Week 1: Duck Amuck (The Language Of Animation: Editing)

How did cartoons such as Duck Amuck (Dir. Chuck Jones, 1953) differ from/or diverge from Disney realism and classical Hollywood cinema. Make a list. Consider things such as aesthetics, the sound, the performance of the characters, the style of animation and the ideology.

This episode was produced by Warner Bros and one of Chuck Jones’s greatest moments of his career. According to the 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. However, characters in many Warner’s cartoons often seem to be trying to break out of the frame as they address the audience animator can do absolutely anything, absolutely easily. It treats and looks at the subject from a different perspective.

At the beginning, the first few seconds, actually do not show anything different is about to happen: there are even the initial credits which look like those at the beginning of the first disney films. But, after few seconds, as Duffy duck proceeds forward into the scene the drawing start to disappear leaving him without any environment to being animated in. He talks directly to the animator, breaking the borders between him and his creator wondering why there is no scenery: somehow is like he is talking to us, a possible interaction within the character and the audience since that at first we can only see the drawing tools. He then starts a numerous attempt to adjust to whatever the animator is creating, trying to fit it. The result is that whatever way the animator draws him like, which ever costume or props he has, his very distinctive personality comes across the same in each example. It definitely make use of the advantages of using animation rather then conventional filmmaking: to create life itself (when the animator erases Duffy or draws him differently) and create also fantastical things which diverge from the reality (especially in the last few seconds when the animator duplicates him or make the frame collapse over him). There is also an interesting aspect in the last scene: is actually bugs bunny who has been animating him so there is an animation within an animation which adds up to the unrealistic aspect of the context.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *