Duck Amuck.

Duck Amuck was a cartoon by Chuck Jones, released in 1953, and is decidedly my favourite piece of cartoon television, ever. It features Daffy Duck. I'm featuring it in my blog, because it breaks every single rule that this cartoon previously ran on.

Imagine in Road Runner: Wile E. Coyote catches the Road Runner, eats him, he stops using Acme poducts, he is now in Central London, talking to everyone in a civilized manner. This breaks every rule of Roadrunner right? Well, Duck Amuck is the 'Merrie Melodies' equivalent.

Duck Amuck is an incredibly postmodern Merrie Melodies short directed by Chuck Jones in 1953, in which Daffy Duck finds himself tormented by a sadistic animator. Seen as a large pencil or paintbrush coming into frame to make alterations, the animator screws around with the backgrounds, erases Daffy, paints him absurd colors, replaces his voice with random sound effects, redraws him as a bizarre four-legged creature, and so forth.

The short was an audacious experiment — which has since come to be regarded as one of the all-time great cartoon shorts

It illustrates a good dose of Modern deconstruction finding its way into the industrial cartoon industry. Daffy is faced with zero narrative cohesiveness, noises are linked with totally illogical images, the world is turned upside down. The cartoonist exposes the fragility of storytelling, of one’s own place in narrative cinema.

It does not so much break the fourth wall, as it does shatter it with a monumentally large bulldozer.

Why do I like it?

The whole premise of this episode is the proof of being able to deconstruct a character with there still being an identity to the said character. Daffy ends up in various places and in numerous situations where his body, face, or voice are either nonexistent or modified completely. All of that went against his will. By the end of the episode we leave him in that sort of nightmarish place where everything can be almost instantaneously changed to work against his best interest. He’s stuck in that reality for an undetermined amount of time, forever at risk of ending up hitting bombs with hammers inadvertently and becoming weird flower monster things and having black curtains appear to basically snuff out his life:

 It lead me to fear a capricious, omniscient, and omnipotent being, one with so much power, and it occurred to me that this cartoon has expressed that if such a power exists, it may not necessarily be good, but malevolent. Although, coinciding with the problem of evil, maybe the cartoon’s not far off the mark from human existence; the inexplicable, bad things that happen at inconvenient times could very well be part of the good fun someone— or something— else is having. Plus, for the fact that Daffy sometimes was on board for things presented to him, or at least willing to roll with what he had to work with, but eventually grew to resent them all, shows that good can come from bad and vice-versa.

Did a cartoon from the ’50s make me ask myself if there could possibly be a god?

Yes.

According to director Chuck Jones, this film demonstrated for the first time that animation can create characters with a recognizable personality, independent of their appearance, milieu, or voice. Although in the end, the animator is revealed to be Daffy’s rival Bugs Bunny, who famously declares “Ain’t I a stinker?”, according to Jones the ending is just for comedic value: Jones is speaking to the audience directly, asking “Who is Daffy Duck anyway? Would you recognize him if I did this to him? What if he didn’t live in the woods? Didn’t live anywhere? What if he had no voice? No face? What if he wasn’t even a duck anymore?” In all cases, it is obvious that Daffy is still Daffy; not all cartoon characters can claim such distinctive personality.

It's probably the only example in cartoon history that portrays stripping back what makes a character fundamentally them, and replacing them with crude caricatures, yet still being able to see that a character is inherently them.

I enjoy the deeper meaning of this particular piece of animation.