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The Great Piggy Bank Robbery<\/em><\/p>\n Kristin here–<\/p>\n During my first year as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the great animator Bob Clampett paid a visit to our campus. I actually got to sit next to him at lunch, and he was a charming, amusing man. Unfortunately I didn\u2019t really know at the time what a genius he was, and, to my eternal regret, I neglected to ask for his autograph.<\/p>\n Today Clampett is less well-known to the general public than is Chuck Jones or Tex Avery. Jones and the other main creators of the classic Warner Bros.\u2019s cartoons reportedly resented Clampett\u2019s attempts to promote his own reputation by claiming sole credit for major achievements, such as \u201cinventing\u201d Bugs Bunny. When Jones put together The Bugs Bunny\/Road Runner Movie<\/em> (1979), there were no Clampett-supervised cartoons included. Clampett never wrote his memoirs. Jones did and left Clampett out. (Below, Draftee Daffy<\/em>, 1945.)<\/p>\n \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 These three major directors had their own distinctive approaches. Jones was on the whole more cerebral and often opted for beautiful visuals, perhaps most obviously evident in What\u2019s Opera, Doc<\/em>. Avery had a penchant for bad puns, often assembling whole cartoons based entirely around them. Clampett went for craziness and often for break-neck speed. The Wikipedia entry<\/a> on him has this to say: \u201chis characters are easily the most rubbery and wacky of all the Warner directors\u2019.\u201d (Above, Baby Bottleneck<\/em> [1946].)<\/p>\n That wackiness was built into the name of one of Warner\u2019s two animated series, \u201cLooney Tunes.\u201d Daffy Duck\u2019s name characterizes him, but modern audiences may not be aware that \u201cBugs\u201d also was a slang term for \u201ccrazy.\u201d Along with Porky Pig, those were the two characters that Clampett used most often.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not going to sum up Clampett\u2019s career here. There is already quite a bit of excellent material on him available on the internet. For an overview of his career and style, see Adrian Danks\u2019s \u201cIt Can Happen Here! The World of Bob Clampett\u201d<\/a> on Senses of Cinema<\/em>; Michael Barrier\u2019s epic 1970 interview with Clampett<\/a>, with comments and corrections, is available on his website. That website contains many other shorter pieces<\/a> on Clampett. Danks and the Wikipedia entry both give enough bibliographical sources to direct enthusiasts to additional information.<\/p>\n My purpose here is more modest. I simply want to point out how to find even more hilarity in Clampett\u2019s cartoons beyond simply watching them.<\/p>\n As I\u2019ve mentioned, David and I are in the process of revising our second textbook, Film History: An Introduction<\/em>. The other day I was working on the section that deals with Hollywood animation in the 1930 to 1945 period. We\u2019re adding more color to the book for its third edition, so I decided that Draftee Daffy<\/em>, which we describe briefly, should have its own color plate.<\/p>\n As I watched the film on DVD, I paused on a number of possible frames to use, and I found myself laughing out loud at almost every one\u2014something that doesn\u2019t often happen during the revision of a textbook. Some of the character movements in Clampett\u2019s films are so fast and brief that they come across as a flurry of images too fleeting to register. Frozen, they reveal some of the extraordinary means that the director and his animators used to achieve those effects of speed. Clampett was also adept at highly exaggerated reactions and hilarious distortions of the animal body. Watching these cartoons with a finger on the pause button can yield hilarity and teach you a lot about normally hidden aspects of the art of animation.<\/p>\n David has written about the artistry in Walt Disney\u2019s films<\/a>. He points out that a quick movement may be accomplished by adding extra limbs, as when in Melody Time<\/em> Johnny Appleseed gathers an armload of falling apples and multiple arms and hands convey the speed of his gestures\u2014as do a pair of phantom heads in the uppermost frame of the three David reproduces.<\/p>\n Such multiple images work without our noticing them. It\u2019s not an obvious sort of technique to use. As David wrote, \u201cThrough trial and error Disney\u2019s animators learned that rather strange single images will look exactly right on the screen; these men were practical perceptual psychologists.\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n The same was true in the Warners animation department. In The Big Snooze<\/em> (1946), Clampett’s last cartoon for the studio, he includes a scene of Bugs rapidly tying Elmer to some railroad tracks. In a couple of frames, he sprouts extra arms and hands. In The Great Piggy Bank Robbery<\/em> (1946), phantom images of Daffy accompany his firing a machine gun.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n But Clampett\u2019s single images were often far stranger than the ones in the Melody Time<\/em> example. In this one from Draftee Daffy<\/em>, for example, the extra figures of Daffy as he frantically builds a wall between himself and his nemesis (the little man from the draft board) are purple. <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n I suppose that\u2019s because multiple black figures of Daffy would blend together, but it\u2019s still a bit weird. As an animator, how do you decide on a color?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Maybe it\u2019s because purple is a subdued color that won\u2019t call attention to the extra ducks and yet will contrast well with the black. It’s also the same color as the floor, so that might create an extra reason why we won’t notice them as standing out from the overall composition as it flashes past. If you know those purple ducks are there, you can just barely see them during normal projection. If you don’t know that, then you’re likely to miss them.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n (I used that example of Daffy building the wall in my sole academic publication on animation, “Implications of the Cel Animation Technique,” in Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, eds., The Cinematic Apparatus<\/em> [St. Martin’s Press, 1980]. There it had to be in black and white, unfortunately.)<\/p>\n Clampett often draws upon a standard animation device, “stretch,” to convey a sense of speed–although his characters may cross a room in as little as two or three frames. The first image of the telephone scene from The Great Piggy Bank Robbery<\/em> is a fairly straightforward example of stretch, yet in the same scene, Daffy rapidly turning around uses the opposite technique, “squash.”<\/p>\n A similar technique which Clampett uses occasionally for a character about to launch into a rapid movement is a sort of squash with a perspective effect stretching the character toward the viewer, as in The Big Snooze<\/em> when Bugs instructs Elmer to “Run this way.” (Bugs isn’t the only one who gets into drag in these cartoons.)<\/p>\n![\"draftee-daffy-1.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/draftee-daffy-1.jpg\" "\\"draftee-daffy-1.jpg\\"")
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