I first saw "Porky and Daffy" at a party in Bob Clampett's studio. Bob used to show us 16 mm prints in his fun room. Mostly he showed his obviously brilliant color classics, but once in a while he would show us a really rare black and white.

He ran "Porky and Daffy" and sat there with a sly look on his face watching the reactions. We were all rolling on the floor laughing.

After the cartoon was over we all looked at Bob with awe and shame and he said to us "You fellas have dirty minds". He looked exactly like Bugs Bunny, just gleeful at the sneaky gags he got away with in this otherwise innocent looking cartoon.





I've since watched Porky and Daffy at least a hundred times.



The more I see it, the more amazing ideas I find in it. It's a huge reservoir of clever ways to move things funny.



This early period of Clampett's career is often overlooked by historians, probably because on the surface the drawings themselves don't look as advanced as the later color cartoons.
But to me, this is the period where Warner Bros. really found its unique voice. Clampett was not only constantly trying new ideas - he gave the characters life.

His characters were living throbbing vessels of cartoon protoplasm. When you watch his cartoons, you aren't just sitting from a distance witnessing funny things happen to cardboard images.

You are instead pulled into the screen and invited to experience the things that the characters cause to happen from their own natural urges and motivations.

That in itself is a major innovation. But here is the one I am talking about in this post:


The other one is that he found a way to insert all kinds of funny and inventive ways to move the characters. It seems that no detail escapes Clampett's thirst for invention.

Even actions and scenes that are not the focus of the storyline are creative.

For example, the other night, Milt Eddie and I were watching Porky and Daffy for the millionth time and I noticed this really funny walk.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Clampett/38PorkyandDaffy/DaffyButtWalk.mov

Obviously, the focus of the scene is The Pelican dragging his anatomy across the canvas. The story point is just a connection between other scenes. Clampett can't bring himself to just let a continuity scene be merely functional. He finds room for fun in everything.

The pelican is hilarious and obvious, but behind him, Daffy walks by to sit on the stool. The walk is crazy and funny. It's a double bounce butt walk! Now if I had a funny walk like this is one of my cartoons, I would want to show it off. I'd wait till the Pelican did his bit, and then frame Daffy so that everyone could get a laugh out of that zany walk.

But to Bob, it's just a throwaway bit of inspired wackiness. He's got so many ideas, he doesn't really need to show each one off. This is the complete opposite of say Chuck Jones' approach. Jones will build whole cartoons around some central wacky idea and really point to it so that the audience and cartoon historians can't miss it. (the breast eyes in Claude Cat cartoons, for example)

Bob tosses away so many ideas that you can watch his cartoons over and over again and still find great stuff you would never have thought of in a million years.

And none of this stuff distracts from the main thrust of the story. The story is always completely and clearly told and you never have trouble following what he wants you to laugh at. He just adds in lots of easter eggs. The total entertainment effect is that everything is completely awake and alive and real. This totally wacky impossible world feels more real and fun than our own mundane 3 dimensional bland existence.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Clampett/38PorkyandDaffy/ButtwalkSlosml.mov














Another thought:


A lot of cartoon history and individual cartoons have been judged on innovation. If something was new and hadn't been done before, it has been traditionally considered a quality cartoon - regardless of the entertainment value.

Most art forms and entertainment are not solely judged on how innovative each work is. They are judged on their skill, their power to evoke emotion and other qualities.

Why is animation so frequently judged on merely how innovative it is?

My theory is because it is still a young field, and it grew and changed so fast between 1930 and 1950. Those cartoons are the best ever produced and at the time, the evolution in techniques was so rapid that you couldn't help but notice the changes. Animation historians of that period tend to judge the talent and creativity of the creators by how much of a change each cartoon or animator effected. Thus, purely entertaining highly skilled directors and animators generally get short shrift from critics. This explains Bob McKimson's poor place in history.

I don't know of a single animator or director alive today that is as skilled, entertaining or funny as Bob McKimson was, yet he gets a bad rap because he wasn't always innovating. He was merely a superhuman talent.

Clampett on the other hand was too innovative. He tried new things out all the time. The problem is he had so many ideas that most of them weren't picked up on by the rest of the business and so many went unnoticed by historians.

Disney had a methodical approach to growth and innovation. They had in house classes to improve their drawing skills, action analysis, etc... you could see progress in skill every month in their 30s cartoons. This also came with a process of discovering and creating rules.

Disney formulated rules to govern what was allowed to happen in their cartoons and what wasn't. This really influenced the rest of the artform.

Clampett innovated and grew through inspiration. He just had spur of the moment inspirations and tried them. He didn't make a preset bible of rules to follow.

His inspirations always fit the context and story that he was directing. He had focused inspirations. What was happening in the story would give him ideas of how to handle it.

His characterizations, his sense of fun and cartooniness and exaggeration did inspire and influence the rest of the industry but the innovation of using natural inspiration and plain fun in every aspect of cartoon making never quite caught on with anyone.

Hopefully now that people are noticing, it might influence the future of our great art form.

Evidently Bob had so many ideas that he didn't feel the need to linger on any of them for too long. "Aaah..there's lots more where that came from".
Some of his takes are pretty perverted.

As I said in my Avery take post, some takes are used as entertainment and some are mere punctuation. Clampett (and Avery) used both. Most animators just use milder takes as part of their cartoon film grammar.

My favorite Clampett takes are the ones that aren't held in place. You aren't laughing solely at a graphic image. Instead, the crazy motion adds a whole new dimension to the gag.




The actual animated eye take here is less than a second long! But you sure don't miss it...


Bob must not have thought of his takes as being that important. They are usually really short, even though they are wildly imaginative. He didn't build any cartoons around them. What would be a crazy punch line in anyone else's cartoon is just another tool that could be used when appropriate, to accentuate a story point.

In Bacall to Arms, the wolf does a montage of takes in quick succession to show how horny he is watching Lauren Bacall in a movie. Here's a 1 second take from it.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Clampett/TakesAntics/BacallTakeTeeth.mov





The rest of the scene is narrative actions and punctuation. To a cartoon writer, the flat image of Catstello would be enough creativity to put the scene across. But to Clampett and his animators, every bit of the narrative is soil for creativity - amazing creativity!
How many takes can you count in the scene above? If you watch it in real time you'd have trouble because all the action is at lightning speed. Yet you feel everything that is happening. It's not too fast to follow the story.



Now he jumps in the air to say he's shocked that Catstello is down in the hole. Then he does a "What do I do??!" dance before he reaches down.


Here's a quick small take to show that he is confused that Catstello wasn't in the hole.
He anticipates
Looks at the flat Catstello...

And does another surprise take. This time his legs spin in the air. You barely even see the action, but you feel it. You know exactly what story-wise is going on.
It kills me that this much inventiveness goes into such minor story points. This really all could have been done with standard animation grammatical tools.
You've heard of film language? There is also a cartoon-film-language with rules and accepted visual signals all its own. The rules started in comic strips, moved to early animated cartoons, then were developed further in the 30s and then for most of the animated cartoon world basically stopped (or at least slowed down considerably) around 1940. But not in Clampett's unit.

Cartoons have their own accepted traditions and structures and grammar, but the mere "correct" application of the rules is not enough to be entertaining or art. We need to use them as tools to create emotions and experiences that work with or without words or literal meanings.

Like in music. The melody, arrangement plus the personalities and styles of the individual musicians all contribute to the overall emotional experience of the music. Why do the Beatles work in every country - most countries can't understand the words or literal meanings of the songs at all - but the musical grammar (which they contributed to) is almost universal, and the soul and talent of musicians playing the music are understood.

Great music with or without words is international.
The musicians in Clampett's unit are his animators. They all understood their shared grammar and punctuation, but were constantly creating new ways to exhibit it.

Can you imagine what a great job it would be to be able to come to work every day and draw new ideas for every scene?


Today we get rules and formula for the sake of them, "That's not the way to do an anticipation, check the manual to see how we do that." That's how animation has been in the last 40 years at most studios.


http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Clampett/TakesAntics/Sourpusstake.mov

I used to think all the flowering of Clampett's creativity happened when he teamed with Scribner and the Avery animators, but you can find all this kind of stuff in the black and white cartoons too.
Here's a crazy animated take from The Sour Puss.
I wonder how you would go about "directing" a scene like this. How did Clampett get this stuff out of all his animators?









http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Clampett/TakesAntics/PorkyTakePorkyandDaffy.mov

Here Porky does a standard take, then goes into trying to revive Daffy.
In animation, your punctuation marks have a lot more versatility. You can have an endless variety of commas if you choose. Porky does this wild action before zipping off screen. It's as if he is building up a ball of energy, so that his explosion off screen is that much more powerful.
Takes, antics, squash and stretch, lines of action are some animation tools that are usually done in a standard way, but they don't have to be. They can be creative and enhance the total entertainment package.

There is so much invisible creativity in Clampett's cartoons that you wonder why they went to so much trouble and detail for every little point in the cartoons. Why? Because it's fun! Who wants to just draw what the script says? Or watch it?

It's called "animation". Let's put the creativity back into the core of the art.


Afterthought:

The animated grammar in Clampett's unit makes his cartoons seem way more intense and real than what anyone else was doing. It's not just the gag ideas in the cartoons that are delivering the entertainment. It's the tools of the artform itself. Jones and Avery continued adding to cartoon film grammar for awhile but I think Clampett did more than anyone. After Clampett left Warners our cartoon language went into a long period of decline. Today, we remember disconnected fragments of what was once a vital, growing, extremely versatile language.

We're still using narrative signals that were forged by cartoonists and animators long ago, but in a very stilted and decayed, blindly dogmatic way. So many animators talk of the importance of telling stories and doing things in live action, novels or cartoons all using the same narrative tools, but they don't.

We use broken animation cliches to tell the same worn-out stories using a handful of shadowy traditions to feebly act them out.

Here's an interesting excerpt from a site about written punctuation:

Many people believe that punctuation rules are rigid commandments and that only the “experts” know all the rules. You may be surprised to learn, however, that it is not the “experts” but rather educated speakers and writers, such as yourself, who have established the practices that have come to be known as the “rules of punctuation.” In other words, over the years good writers have used punctuation in ways that have made their messages especially clear to their readers. Writers have agreed to follow these practices because they have proven to be so effective...

...

The rules of punctuation are not static; they have changed throughout the years and will continue to change. What once might have been considered improper punctuation may now be considered correct. The rules of punctuation are created and maintained by writers to help make their prose more effective, and their exact meaning changes over time, just as traffic rules evolve with time. (For example, in many states it is now acceptable to make a right turn at a red light if no oncoming vehicles are in sight.) At any point in time, a particular punctuation mark means what writers agree it means; as consensus shifts, so will its meaning.

If you approach punctuation with this understanding of its origin and flexibility, you will not be intimidated by the conventions of punctuation.

Here's the whole article:

http://lilt.ilstu.edu/golson/punctuation/intro.html