-
7. What's Up--and Down--Doc?: Warner Bros., Chuck Jones, and Abstract Space
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157 7 WHAT’S UP—AND DOWN—DOC? Warner Bros., Chuck Jones, and Abstract Space Though for many people in the 1930s and 1940s Disney was the standard by which animation was judged, Warner Bros., with its Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons, would increasingly challenge that preeminence in the post–World War II era. In fact, as Timothy White chronicles, the widespread praise of Disney animation, largely for its “level of sheer craftsmanship” (40), began to wane precisely as the Warner Bros. stable of characters—Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and many others—developed and began to win a popular audience . But that popularity was due to more than just the nature of those figures, which were noticeably more frantic, more anarchic, and ultimately funnier than Disney’s. They were characters that inhabited a very different world; as Barry Putterman has observed, it is a “noticeably nonnaturalistic” environment (33), one that could never be confused with the supposedly realistic spaces for which, as we have seen, a number of commentators had already begun to criticize Disney. Yet that “nonnaturalistic” epithet only begins to suggest the nature of the difference here. In the Warner Bros. cartoons, particularly those of the late 1940s and the 1950s, we see animating space itself undergoing a radical change; in some cases, as in the celebrated Daffy Duck cartoon Duck Amuck (1953), it becomes completely unstable and even seems to disappear, at one point leaving Daffy lost and purposeless in a plain Animating Space 158 white frame, but in the process opening up a new level of meaning for the cartoon. White suggests that the shift in critical estimation ultimately owes much to the rise of European art films in the 1950s and 1960s, with their own radically different treatment of character, but a more complete assessment would need to take into account the rise of—and increasing cultural fascination with—what Amid Amidi terms the “cartoon modern.”1 Certainly the art film, as typified by such works as L’Avventura (1960), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and My Life to Live (1962), would often present characters as ciphers and space as an almost abstract rendering of lines and surfaces, while reflexively shooting holes in conventional cinema’s reality illusion. And the Warner Bros. product, especially the cartoons created by Chuck Jones, played with many of these same effects. Yet they were doing so and already attracting attention with their deliberately designed worlds and their “more stylized, often abstract approach to movement” (Amidi 10) before many of the European auteurs of the New Wave had even begun to work in film. Often associated more with the work of United Productions of America (UPA) and its briefly popular Gerald McBoing Boing and, later, its Mr. Magoo films, cartoon modern drew heavily on a variety of earlier art movements—cubism, surrealism, expressionism—all of which in various ways had launched assaults on conventional realism and its common spatial illusion. There was a sense, as Amidi suggests, that in much animation, but especially that emanating from the Disney studio, the drive for such realism had been at too great a cost, that it had eventually “trumped the graphic possibilities inherent in the art form” (9). By adapting principles drawn from these art movements and even pushing their potential, however, animators hoped to reconnect with this neglected graphic vein, not only opening up new spaces after the fashion of the modernist project described by Vidler and others, but virtually exploding the conventional space of animation. In the new, graphically driven cartoons that resulted—the work emanating from UPA, much of the Warner Bros. output during this period, and even some of Disney’s efforts, notably cartoons directed by Ward Kimball—we can easily see the influence of this stylistic turn. Characters become line-drawn caricatures, traditional perspective prac- [18.212.242.203] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:50 GMT) What’s Up—and Down—Doc? 159 tically disappears, and various elements of the designed mise-en-scène seem to vie for attention with the often motionless or limited-motion characters to which the animation studios were increasingly turning. Though in these efforts space never quite “vanishes,” as Paul Virilio puts it (Lost 34), it does seem to become practically hidden within the larger design scheme, or radically “collapsed,” as David Harvey proposes (293). Chronicling this changing nature of spatial representation in the late modern period, Stephen Kern describes how negative space— the space of background, of...