100 Greatest Animated Shorts / Duck Amuck / Chuck Jones
USA / 1953
This is one of the cleverest, funniest and best-known cartoons of the 1000+ in the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series produced by Warner Bros and one of Chuck Jones’s greatest moments. The animator/director’s relationship with the character he defined, Daffy Duck, has a real tangible quality as the boundaries of the cartoon and the ‘fourth wall’ are broken apart, with the furious Daffy railing out of the screen against his creator. This of course isn’t unique, as characters in many Warner’s cartoons often seem to be trying to break out of the frame as they address the audience, discuss the fact they are in a cartoon, and sometimes run off the filmstrip itself.
In this short, Jones perfectly demonstrates that the greatest thing about animation is that the animator can do absolutely anything, absolutely easily. Like all art, it’s not about reproducing reality – it’s about stylising it and looking at it from a different perspective. In this case, the joke is that the animator is altering reality too fast and too much for the character’s liking. Daffy is trying to hang on to some semblance of logic as the animator changes the background, the sound, the frame, and eventually even Daffy himself.
Jones later explained that in this cartoon he was proving that the character of Daffy was now something that existed outside his appearance, voice, or cartoon setting, as here he is transformed into many different forms and yet still remains Daffy. Perhaps Jones is trying to show us that Daffy is now so real that he has a soul.
Analysis aside, Duck Amuck was number two in a survey for Jerry Beck’s 1994 book The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals in which Chuck Jones films accounted for four of the top five.
Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is an list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome but please don’t shoot us, it’s only a list!