My Favorite Duck

In this cartoon, Daffy hasn't "grown up" yet. He doesn't have the character flaws like greed and vanity we came to love; he's just a troublemaker, another tool for the artists to use to explore their craft.

And explore they do! Gravity, point of view, and finally, even the "reality" of the cartoon itself are discarded, each for precise comic effect, thirteen years before the classic `Duck Amuck' did it.

They even use music in unexpected ways. An often-missed gag revolves around the songs assigned to each character. For Porky, it's a peaceful "Moonlight Bay", an old song, even in the 1940's. Daffy sings the more current swing piece made popular by Cab Calloway, "Blues in the Night" (My Momma done told me, when I was in knee pants).

Each song helps to define the characters, so you don't think it's unusual for them to be singing as they go about their business, but Porky accidentally starts off Daffy's song, reacts, then corrects himself. "My Momma done told me ... nghhh! ... We were sailing along". He looks directly at us to register his annoyance as he realizes his mistake, just in time for us to realize we've been set up.

It's not only a hilarious cartoon; it's an example of animation stretching the limits of the medium as both an artistic and comedic exercise.

Maybe there's nothing particularly new in "My Favorite Duck", but how can you not like to see Daffy irk Porky? True, we see this so many times, that this may come across as boring, but Daffy's antics - ranging from zany to sadistic - and Porky's reactions more than make up for it. In my opinion at least, the highlight is the "down here" scene. But the surprise ending is also pretty cool. They sure must have had fun filming this cartoon.

"That, my friend, is a matter of opinion." Well, I don't see how someone could not consider this cartoon a masterpiece. Another great one for the crowd behind the Looney Tunes cartoons.

Visually this is much more like a cartoon from the late 40s rather than 1942. It shows the way for the future, refined Chuck Jones style. The long perspective shots and the stylized backgrounds are rare for that time and the timing and nature of the dialog is unmistakably Chuck Jones (his first cartoon with writer Michael Maltese). If it wasn't for the early loony trickster characterization of Daffy this could easily be mistaken for a release from '49 or '50. Daffy also tries to exploit "duck season" as he would ten years later with Bugs in the "Duck Season/Rabbit Season" toons. Don't miss this one! It's on volume 6 of the Golden Collection and, for the first time in many years, you can really enjoy the full impact of the color scheme.

My Favorite Duck (1942)

**** (out of 4)

One of the all-time greatest animated shorts finds Porky Pig going out to the country for some rest and relaxation but instead he runs into Daffy Duck who wants to make sure that pain and torment is all he gets. MY FAVORITE DUCK is without question one of the funniest animated shorts ever made because there's just so much great action and I'd argue that neither Porky or Daffy were ever better than what we get right here. It's hard to pick out one or two favorite scenes because the entire short is just one bit of greatness after another. If I was forced to pick a highlight it would probably be the sequence where Porky finally snaps, burns to a crisp and then starts his revenge. The film manages to be downright hilarious at times and the level of violence is just priceless.

'My Favorite Duck' may seem to be little more than a variation on the classic Bugs Bunny model, wherein an elusive creature, more normally thought of as easy prey, interminably torments his slow-witted hunter. And boy can Daffy torment, a whirligig irritant, managing to be in all places at once, on land, air or sea, in every conceivable position, at every conceivable angle. The thing is, Porky is no Elmer or Sylvester, he wishes Daffy no harm, he just wants relaxation and solitude in the great outdoors, as promised by decades of American Western mythology. Daffy goads him out of his solitude, his apathy, forces him to take action (he is a dark subconsious sprite mocking our unsociable, isolationist, private ideals), just as a year earlier, America was shocked into entering World War II.

Daffy is the black to Porky's white, they are inseparable - without Daffy, Porky seems incomplete; with him he turns from a peace-loving, nature-seeking dolt into a fearsome murderer, whose inexorable forward drive, fuelled by anger and righteous vengeance, has all the brute force of an army, so powerful that it bursts open the frame, destroys the world of the film, that vast Western expanse, the very reel itself, turning our two protagonists, who are of course mere lines, into ghosts, playacting at movement, life. We many be over-familiar with such self-reflexivity now, but think back to 1942, the year of 'Casablanca' - it must have been unnerving, especially coming from Hollywood.

'My Favorite Duck' is directed by Chuck Jones, one of the great directors, and he relishes the darkness, the playfulness, the formal implications of the story; the paradox of turning a rigid square frame into a site of insane movement and endless possibility, while at the same time reducing the vast Western outdoors, that mythic site unsullied by history, where a man can be free, of people, of his past, is narrowed, Leone-like, into a claustrophobic space, where you simply cannot get rid of that deuced awkward, protean Other (this is signalled earlier on in an establishing shot, where the landscape looks curiously like a duck's mouth).

Amid all the gleeful carnage, there are two standout, gravity-defying sequences, which turn emblems of easy-going bourgeois Americana into nightmare scenarios, devoid of security or perspective by a mere flip, where the breaking of the laws of physics encourage rupture in the laws of property and identity; as a snoozing angler finds himself suspended from a sea-turned-sky, hurtling to his own imagined self, or joining his perfect home flying into space, exact in every reassuring particular except it's grounded on air. Magic!