Duck Amuck
Directed by Chuck Jones
Written by Michael Maltese
Starring Daffy Duck
“Buster, it may come as a complete surprise to you to find that this is an animated cartoon, and that in animated cartoons, they have scenery, and in all the years I’ve…
(As he vents, he is erased from the feet up.)
“Alright, wise guy, where am I?”
-Daffy Duck
Debates go on all the time about what the most “perfect movie ever made” could be. Is it something like Citizen Kane? The Godfather? Musical fans will go for Singin in the Rain, action fans for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Foreign film lovers may suggest 400 Blows or Seven Samurai. I don’t believe a work of art should be perfect: as Ray Bradbury says, if you keep trying to perfect something, you perfect it out of existence. If a movie has a flaw, it reminds me that there is somebody human working on it; the camera going blurry during Frank Sinatra’s red queen speech in The Manchurian Candidate, for example.
But if a work of art is to be perfect, it is perfect in large part because it is short and to the point, without an ounce of fat. You can have perfect sequences in films, even if the films that surround them have flaws. Apocalypse Now is a flawed movie, but the Ride of the Vaklyries sequence is as perfect as moviemaking can be.
My nominee for the most perfect movie ever made? Chuck Jones’s 1953 masterpiece, Duck Amuck. Would I defend this in an academic setting? Probably not. But we’re not in an academic environment, so now I have to defend this!
Duck Amuck is the best cartoon Warner Brothers ever made during their golden age of animation. Most animation historians and fans have it in their top five, along with What’s Opera Doc? and also One Froggy Evening. Unlike those cartoons, however, Duck Amuck’s genius comes from the fact that for the first time, a cartoon is making us aware of the fact that we are watching a cartoon. And it does it with the best character possible: Daffy Duck.
Daffy Duck first appeared in the WB canon during the 1930s, when Tex Avery was using him as just an insane duck who would come on screen and say some crazy things. As he evolved over time, he became more of an antagonist, a character whose frustrations we enjoy because we know that nine times out of ten, we will never experience his pains. But when he’s not being beaten with everything but the kitchen sink, we can feel his frustration. None of us have ever had anvils dropped on our heads, but there have been moments where we go on stage and bomb with the audience, as Daffy does in several cartoons with his arch-rival, Bugs Bunny. As Chuck Jones said in an interview once, “I wake up thinking I’m Bugs Bunny, but when I look in the mirror I see Daffy Duck.”
There are few greater joys in Warner Brothers cartoons than watching Daffy get really, really pissed off about something. Duck Amuck is seven minutes of nothing but Daffy getting really, really pissed off. As a result, it always makes me laugh, no matter how many times I see it. When it begins, we think we’re watching a conventional cartoon. Daffy leaps on screen as a musketeer, but suddenly the background ends and he finds himself against nothing but white. “Pssst! Whoever’s in charge here—the scenery! Where’s the scenery?” he asks in the most polite moment of the cartoon. From there the background changes to a farm, angering Daffy, who has to go into a farm costume—until he walks through the scene and finds himself in the Arctic. From the Arctic he goes to Hawaii, until finally he’s back in front of a white background.
Now having played with backgrounds, we see what happens when Daffy Duck gets all his sounds mixed up. Treg Brown, the brilliant Looney Tunes sound designer, is at his best here finding the most awkward noises imaginable for Daffy. Now a singing cowboy, he strums his guitar, only to find no sound coming out. In a trademark Looney Tunes moment, he holds up a sign saying “Sound please!” and gets a machine gun rattle as soon as he strums. In frustration, he breaks the guitar, only for it to haw like a donkey. When he opens his mouth to scream, but crows like a rooster. When the sound does finally come back, Daffy flies around the frame screaming gibberish.
One of the most brilliant things about Duck Amuck is that it plays with the concept of Daffy’s existence as a character in this animated world. Since Daffy doesn’t exist in real life, who says he even has to be a duck to begin with? Daffy’s transformation by the unseen animator into a weird four-legged, multi-colored, flower-faced creature with a flag saying he’s a screwball on his tail is one of the most beloved moments in any Warner cartoon for precisely this reason. We get to see Daffy take on a myriad of roles in this cartoon, changing his costume constantly, but even with a different suit or body, he’ll always be Daffy Duck—this insane personality who hates what the world gives him.
Just when you think Duck Amuck is running out of ideas, it pulls a fast one as we watch the edges of the frame collapse around Daffy. Even though he’s been beaten constantly, he refuses to lose the war as he keeps trying to prevent the picture from collapsing in on itself. The only other moment in animation which reaches the heights of this absurdity is at the end of Richard Williams’ The Thief and the Cobbler, where the mute thief runs into the frame, yanks on the edges and finds that he’s actually stolen the film strip, before he wanders off silently.
By the film’s end, Daffy has been thoroughly beaten, and when he demands that the unseen animator finally reveal himself, we finally see the famous gloved hand of Bugs Bunny draw a door and shut it, locking out Daffy. It’s revealed finally that Bugs has been tormenting Daffy this whole time, sitting at an animator’s desk. “Ain’t I a stinker?” he smiles as the camera finally irises out. So Duck Amuck is a joke upon a joke upon a joke: an animated cartoon about the mutability and absurdity of animated cartoons drawn by an animated cartoon character as though he actually existed in the real world—an animated cartoon character drawing an animated cartoon character and making his unrealistic life a living hell. There’s a lot to take in there. I’m surprised that Camus and Sartre didn’t write essays about the utter existential nature of this short film.
No Warner cartoon ever played with the properties of animation so hysterically well. Rabbit Rampage, a follow-up, featured Elmer Fudd tormenting Bugs Bunny in the frame, but we don’t enjoy watching Bugs get frustrated because we always want him to win. The people who don't enjoy watching Daffy get frustrated are not people I want in my foxhole.
So is Duck Amuck the most perfect movie ever made? It's hysterical, it borders on existential at times, doesn't have a single wasted image or moment, and does its job in only seven minutes time. I don't know if its perfection qualifies it as a "masterpiece," because it's too small to be that. But how often do you see something that's perfect? For those of you who haven’t yet seen it, here is the link to watch the short in its entirety on Youtube. Perfection awaits.
The Link isn't here. - Ted
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