Rating: 4/7

Rating: 6/7

I give 13's to cartoons that go beyond mere comic masterpiece. They do something extra special to really wow me, like a plot that evokes emotion besides laughter or an unprecedented experiment in animation (while 14 and 15-rated cartoons in turn create new archtypes, new choreographing sequences without falling back on the slightest recycled idea, immerse me in the characters whether or not I laugh). Russian Rhapsody gives me the latter, with a Hitler that goes beyond mere caricature into giving him a personality tied to his real-life counterpart and keeping him fundamentally a cartoon character. It's not as sophisticated as Osamu Tezuka's depiction of him in Adolf but that's a longform manga where he could take his time developing Hitler into a more "humanized" character, while Clampett takes a short cartoon to ridicule his ruthlessness, egotism, and over-emoting at speeches.

The events that set-up Adolf's foray into Russia are told through a series of newspapers spinning on camera, where they can't resist squeezing in a "mmm...could be" gag. From there an explosion leads to Hitler surrouned by props like a "PU" shaped microphone ranting in broken English phrases with a German accent in that soaring high pitched voice (think a higher Yosemite Sam lacking the southern accent) and sticking his arms, neck, and belly every which way. If you're not feeling what Bob Clampett and his animators felt about Hitler's speech making, which must have been equal intimidation and amusement, go join the Italian neo-fascist party or something.

Nothing lives up to Adolf's speech, but goodness knows the Gremlins try with their various antics while singing a cheery work anthem, dismantling the plane with little regard for their safety, to say nothing of Hitler's. They saw and hack and jump and leap about and feed termites and sneak around Hitler in the cockpit. The jazz saxophone break after he discovers them is one of the most tense cartoon moments, culminating in a delightful display of fear from Adolf. Most of the Gremlins are based on the WB staff, but they're goofy monster designs in their own right, if not as stand-out as the one from Falling Hare.

I'm not entertained by it every step of the way each viewing, but that Adolf speech totally psyches me up and he is genuinely creepy as opposed to gag fodder like in other WB cartoons. This may be the greatest Hitler caricature ever, and is replete with a goofy song and dance number while tearing a plane apart. And he even does Lew Lehr at the end, how can ya not love that?

Rating: 7/7

Ho boy. You know, I wish this had been Robert Clampett’s last cartoon instead of The Big Snooze, ‘cause then he really would have gone out with a bang. Oh well, when you arrive on the scene after 50 years the order doesn’t matter. Bugs pulls out his wildest, craziest schemes and character impersonations ever in this one. It would almost trump Tortoise Wins By a Hare except I’m more impressed by how that one blends the story, visuals, and sounds together. And if I really had to nitpick, Hare Ribbin is best enjoyed after seeing the Bugs Bunnys up to this point, because many of the funniest gags are plays on older ones.

That especially applies to the ‘I’m looking for a little gray rabbit” – “Does he look like/do this” routine where Bugs grabs the dog and plays around with his tongue and tail. The dog goes through a wide range of emotions, from calm to excited to intense to giddy to incredibly po’ed, each an effective reaction to whatever stunt Bugs pulls on him. It’s enhanced with an outrageous change of scenery for the rest of the cartoon and some plainly ridiculous disguises for Bugs.

The animation in here may be the most careful and disciplined in Clampett’s 5 years of color output. Every movement just screams fluidity and the sequencing is delicate, yet it never distracts from the characters it animates (Cripes, how many different ways will I find to say that?), and it just looks hilarious when the dog looks into the camera, going along with Bugs’ deception, then suddenly gets wise and bursts out in bemusement.

Although I shouldn’t waste space in trying to describe them, there are lots of amazing sequences in here that outclass all later Bugs Bunny cartoons.

Rating: 5/7

Tweety's second appearence is the only one by Bob Clampett to focus on a single cat, so while you miss out on the bonus of going back and forth between Babbit and Catstello and the scenes involving Tweety this one focuses on the Barney Rubble cat's personality quirks. His tongue is used by Tweety as a blanket and he does all kinds of cute takes like crawling on the ground with a sinister grin to tip-toeing with a toothless grin, and generally flashing a variety of expressions from surprise to comatose to passive. He even jiggles his blubber while going "dooooh".

The cat following Tweety off the branch is funny for its suddenness and sheer audacity, as well as Tweety's reality check where he can barely hide his sadistic pleasure at the cat falling. The best scenes in fact have Tweety injuring the cat in someway and musing on how he did it, like the fireman scene which starts with Tweety lighting a match inside the puddy tat, shining all these cute spotlights out of eyes and ears, and ending with Tweety pumping gasoline in the puddy tat, going "dinglinglinglinglinglinglinglingling" all the while.

Instead of keeping Tweety in one place as with the Freleng cartoons, he and the cat run all over the place. The bulldog gets his head creased after chasing the puddy tat - stretching his hind legs over his head - through a rapid sucession of trees, uttering the classic phrase, "This shouldn't even happen to a dog". I've never laughed at the egg gag but you get to see Tweety go, "I like him, he's silly", as well as a chicken embarassed over losing her feathers.

Rating: 6/7

Clampett's unit has probably by mistake crafted a cartoon that equals The Great Piggy Bank Robbery. Some people at Warner Bros. cited this cartoon as proof that Clampett's Bugs is too mean, and they could be right as he is the aggressor in this one, even though the lightness of what he steals deflates that initiative. Nevertheless, Bugs' characterization remains consistent as he finds new roles like train robber and creaky old messenger to play in heckling the Red Hot Ryder.

RHR is a short, bulb-nosed DUEEEHR with a delicately-varied walk cycle and a smart horse, assigned to destablize the menace of Bugs as the Masked Marauder, who raids a town in the introduction with cuts and pans to places where people scream about him from off frame. The main action is set up by an excited announcer like a cheesy old western, I guess, and starts with Ryder woahing his horse...and literally running backwards in-front-of the horse as they speed past the repetitive background in doing so, which is probably meant to show how ignorant the Red Hot Ryder is of his own stupidity.

Just like Bugs Gets the Boid, Buckaroo Bugs makes the desert more interesting than it should be. All Bugs and Red Hot Ryder need to get you hollering and hootening are a cactus and some sand. Most of the gags begin with Red Hot asking if Bugs has seen the Masked Marauder, and Bugs always does a variation of "Does he look like/do this" that involves miming and expanding on the disguises and assaults on the Ryder's person from the last scene, often running to another surprise gag when least expected. Bugs' mock train robbery, easily the best moment here, only lasts a few seconds and each time I pick up a new detail.

If that weren't enough we have the Ryder victimized by his horse's frustration and Bugs' zig-zagging unicycle ride. The film culminates in an insanely repetitive frenzy of Bugs misleading the Ryder over one canyon after another. These gags are all brilliant, so it deserves a high rating, even if the Library of Congress will never bother to include it alongside Porky in Wackyland.

Rating: 6/7

I’ve always found the premise of this cartoon questionable, or at least I would if it weren’t handled in the way I’ll describe below. Unlike many American comics fans who want continuity in their material, I’d rather judge a comic on its own instead of how it relates to other comics. Of course, most American animation doesn’t value continuity and would rather tell a short story in a few minutes. The point to these older cartoon characters is you don’t care about them when they’re not on the screen. You don’t clamor to see Bugs Bunny’s childhood so you can find out how he turned into a cynical bastard (at least I hope you don’t), so I’ve never cared for cartoon plots that try to explain a character’s past (and why I applaud Jhonen Vasquez for handling his characters the way he does). The 80’s Bugs Bunny sequel that shows Bugs and Elmer chasing each other for the first time, for example, treats the ‘backstory’ of the characters seriously, and comes off dry (a similar example would be McKimson’s What’s Up Doc?).

Old Grey Hare isn’t like that, thankfully. While it did open the door for marketing morons to sanction cartoons that have nothing to do with the classics and make the characters babies, it’s completely focused on gags and not some ridiculous backstory. Some of the gags work better if you’re thoroughly familiar with the previous Bugs and Elmer cartoons, but who isn’t? This may be the last cartoon to feature a brilliant twist on the hunting wabbits set-up until Chuck Jones did the Wabbit/Duck season trilogy.

It opens with Elmer sobbing in one of the most memorable motions by Bob McKimson, King of Fluid Animation. As is usually the case with a cartoon containing McKimson animation, the characters are proportionally larger than usual and things are rubbery. Then he ends up in the future as an old man due to a bombastic voice from the heavens and reads a most hilarious front page. I wonder if Carl Stalling really did say the quote that made it into the subheading?

The first confrontation between Bugs and Elmer makes more sense if you’re familiar with the “have you seen/what does he look like/nope, haven’t seen him” routine. It’s a great gag if you have, with the best timing in the cartoon being Elmer suddenly sticking his gun in Bugs’ chest before he can finish his sentence. The other little twists on the usual encounter are also funny.

The rest of the cartoon is no slouch of course. Bugs’ escape from Elmer has him rambling gibberish like an old man while limping in-front-of some futuristic wasteland. For some reason the film seems to skip a frame, which is actually kind of neat. The visual effect of Bugs being hit is one of the strangest effects animations I’ve seen in a WB cartoon, but still kinda neat with those crazy lights and score numbers flashing around the screen.

But anyway, getting to the flashback – and the fact that this cartoon goes into a flashforward and progresses to a flashback makes it one of Clampett’s weirder stories – it isn’t just some gimmick. Some amazingly well-done slap-happiness arises from the new setting. Enough to chase away the nightmares of Tiny Toons. The parallel encounter is hilarious just because of their new baby personas. So is the chase scene where they just bounce rhythmically through the background.

The end gag, where Bugs and Elmer go into the grave, is one of the best end gags Bob Clampett has done, and was the first gag in here to really crack me up. The shaking “That’s All Folks” end card just completes the picture. I think this was the kind of cartoon Clampett aimed for when doing Big Snooze, but this has some real comedy in it.

Rating: 6/7

When I first saw this as a kid, I could relate to Daffy as I just read about the Civil War and WWII and dreaded getting drafted. However, the plot isn't about getting drafted as it is about Daffy's fear, and even though he was a more agreeable character under Clampett his zaniness and selfeshness comes out in full force.

The film looks clear and crisp and Daffy's walk cycles look jagged as he struts through the background, waving his arms around and improvising a medley about America's victory overseas. That he apparently means it only makes his flip-flopping when "the little man from the draft board" shows up even funnier. The almost sincere, spitfire sobbing makes that scene for me.

This turns out to be the best chase cartoon that isn't a chase cartoon I ever saw. For sheer spectacle of running from one room to the other in your own house that seems to conjure new rooms and hallways wherever you turn Draftee Daffy is the one to beat. Literally blazing through the house in a bolt of lightning Daffy executes one plan after another to leave the house and escape the draft guy, constantly foiled and forced to run away again. Marvel at the twist and turns as Daffy packs his suitcase, tries to blow up the little draft guy and shoves him in a vault, doing a bad guy laugh shaking up and down, clasping his hands together.

The fastest cartoon I've seen, it's planned well enough to come out as an unfettered-release of Daffy derangedness. It explores his character just as much as The Great Piggy Bank Robbery and deserves to be recognized along the same lines.

Rating: 5/7

As is the case with Bob Clampett cartoons this one has a ton of creative ideas, with elaborate gags, hyperactive escalations of the action (for example, a dog interrupts the cartoon to steal a kiss from the female cat the two cats are fighting over, only to put the cartoon back on track when he's finished) and experiments with camera angles. But most of these "ideas" aren't developed to my satisfaction - the progression from one scene to another feels cramped after awhile, as if there were too many ideas thrown in here and they had to rush it to the end.

My biggest issue with Gruesome Twosome is that Tweety is barely used compared to the other two cartoons - he's only on screen for about half the cartoon with nothing done to establish that menacing presence he had off-camera in TOTK, and he's supposed to be the focus of the plot! Meanwhile the spotlight is given to a fat, yellow, sub-Barney Rubble cat and a red Jimmy Durante caricature. Their fights, which are so sudden and gratuitous and involve things like spiked clubs and random assaults interrupting speeches, are the best thing about the cartoon.

Other good features include the mispronunciation gag, the camera angle for the two cats falling out of Tweety's nest (Imagine looking overhead at the ground from far away as Tweety pokes his head from the side), and Tweety mocking the Durante-cats "Ha cha cha cha" laugh at the end. The rushed feeling prevents it from climbing higher, but it's still a lot of fun to watch.

Rating: 6/7

Usually I don’t like remakes. But tracing the artistic development of someone like Bob Clampett is a lot of fun, and this is an especially useful cartoon for doing so. It helps that it tops the original by several yards, probably the only time I’ll say that about a remake (I sure won’t be saying it about Dough for the Do-Do) and this was the version I saw first, so I can’t but think of it as the real one even if the premise and characterization are out of place for 1940s WB.

Although I miss a few scenes (When Injun Joe cuts a mountain passage in the silhouette of a city block, parachutes down the cliff, and taunts the bear by eating his ice cream), it’s fascinating to see how they enhance the cartoon with crunchier Mel Blanc voices, a redesign of Injun Joe where his eyes are covered by dreadlocks that make him look even more ridiculous, redos of a few sequences that are even better now like Joe’s shoot out and Slappy Moe’s bouncing everywhere, sharper animation in place of the rubbery flailing, subtler timing and lots of details more typical of 40s Bob Clampett, including bookend scenes to give it more narrative.

There are too many details to go into, but this is a funny and successful merging of Clampett’s late-30s and mid-40s styles.

Rating: 5/7

Bashful Buzzard is a non-essential cartoon with some great gags and no incentive to watch it over and over. The opening recycles animation from Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid with newly overdubbed vocals (Or maybe they’re just very similar looking). Either way I still love the Buzzard family, but they’re far less interesting without Bugs’ cynical wit to contrast their down syndrome.

As usual, Robert McKimson’s animation is good, but he’s never animated as creatively as he did in Horton Hatches the Egg, Tortoise wins by a Hare, and Corny Concerto. My favorite bit of animation in here is when “Killer” flies toward the “rooster”. During his goofy vocal intonation (“watch me nab that great big rooster”), the wind lines flow off the movement of his head, mouth, and wings very nicely.

BB’s got one of those gags that rely totally on the element of surprise whose impact diminishes each time. In fact, it was so blatantly that way it didn’t have any impact on me the first time. Not that I’d want to spoil the surprise for you. At least the buzzard’s reaction to his predicament is funny. Not to mention the cutting that hides the surprise is really clever.

Killer’s brothers bring home some outlandish animals for dinner, to say the least, and the fact that the mother buzzard can stuff it all in the pot is really something. The scene where they swipe farm animals is funny, especially with the old chicken scolding them. A sense of slap-happiness pervades the shot of the brothers flying with the outlandish items they were’t shown swapping.

Well, that was a weak review, but no way can this one spurn a 1,300 word essay out of me. It feels more like a place to put supplementary gags than a fully developed idea.

Rating: 7/7

Deceptively resembling a late 30’s/early 40’s WB short at first glance, Book Revue is teeming with inspired lunacy and is a good summation of WB cartoons from since the Avery-era. It’s yet another books come-to-life picture, a concept that hadn’t been used in at least six years, and instead of coming off as dated or refried, it injects life into the concept with startlingly creative visuals (The Indian drummer who ends up on a jazz drum set), thematic unity (Showing some of the same books twice with a different purpose the second time around), and it actually builds to a frenzy when the various characters get involved in some kind of conflict.

Concept-wise, Book Revue doesn’t do anything new yet everything seems to be unprecedented. The 40s-era developments complement the older look when Daffy impersonates some celebrity with a South American accent in a pink tuxedo and frilly yellow wig, and goes between nasty bleating and serious singing. And at least two of the greatest visual and aural inventions ever are right here: Daffy bouncing on his ass far into the background and marching back into the camera, and his warble when trying to warn Red Riding Hood. If that weren’t enough, it looks funny when he tries to eat Red’s leg as a demo of what the wolf will do to her, and it’s funny on another level that he’s unaware he’s the one in danger.

The cartoon has a multi-faceted identity, even, as opposed to an identity crisis. Sometimes it’s a psycho caricature fest, and other times it’s a musical with sung dialogue. The wolf ending up in jail crams so many ideas into a few seconds, as if the rest of the cartoon doesn’t, that I’m laughing and in a rush at the same time. It’s held together by moving so fast it edits even the slightest movement that’s unnecessary for the action, so the wolf’s jailbreak is a treat of madcap film-making. The development is so swift and focused it’s a wonder I can even go back to the earlier cartoons in this style.

Maybe this review could be longer, but if I described everything I liked in a highly-rated Clampett cartoon, this page would never load.

Rating: 6/7

I don’t think any cartoon is as frivolous, surreal, hyperactive, or animated with such force and gusto as Baby Bottleneck. After the stork takes five at a bar and drinks himself under the table (With like five points of movement – his beak flops around even as he bends his neck and head), there’s scene after scene of hired help delivering babies to the wrong parents. Whoever created these scenes was running on gasoline: A pelican pushing his own beak full of babies, a few blue birds dragging a diapered rhino, an alligator trying to suckle a pig, a Scottish dog rock-a-bying a hippo, and more all remind me of early 1900s comic strips where the animals were drawn with realistic skill yet exaggerated enough to look credibly like a cartoon and engaged in human vices.

The pacing isn’t just fast. It speeds like a cheetah through the jungle, knocking down everything in its path and breaking through concrete. Some of the cuts are choppy yet thanks to the non-stop motion and weird imagery they never feel awkward like an Arthur Davis cartoon.

Porky and Daffy show up, yet it’s obvious the animation is the real star. This puts plot aside and bulldozes a shovel full of insane imagery and hyperactive movement. Babies readied for delivery on conveyor belts, rocket-powered seagulls, Daffy’s leg stretched like Plastic Man… And that reminds me, Bottleneck contains the most gratuitously hyper sequence ever when Daffy is too masculine to sit on an egg, and Porky has to convince him. Porky running into the screen and doing a back bend on his tongue and Daffy’s body moving every which way along with Daffy himself are just a few of the indescribable moments. Instead of just throwing more scenes it culminates with the most reckless abandon for staging and pacing. Every crazy idea has been thrown in here, and it gives me a head rush instead of a headache. The gradient background during their exchange (Where Daffy’s hat is drawn at a bizarrely gigantic size) reminds me of, you guessed it, the Ren and Stimpy scenes that use nutty backgrounds.

There’s no meaningful plot or character development in here, just a celebration of the wonders of animation.

Rating: 6/7

This is one of Bob Clampett's most frenzied cartoons. It could be my favorite but falls short for whatever reason (maybe the plot at heart isn’t solid, I dunno, I can't really pin it down). Nevertheless, it's hard to find a cartoon with so many idiosyncratic elements that gel as effectively. Even the introductory sequence is a blast, establishing the plot for the cartoon with various households kicking their cats out the door, culminating in a snobby butler kicking out a snobby cat with a cut from the front door to the front yard that's so sudden the cat will crash land on your brain.

But the focus of the cartoon is on Porky and his four cats, and each one is well designed and unique, including an innocent-looking little furball, a nappy-looking clown-thing and Sylvester, but his design is radically different from Friz Freleng's cartoons (and don't forget the character had barely been used at this point). This is the best use of Porky by anyone ever - his personality is sharply defined and expanded beyond a stuttering pig, with several twists on his way of thinking and his cleverness walks hand-in-hand with his stupidity. The scenes where he yells at the cats are major standouts, with his body flailing each and everyway, synced to the dialogue, shifting him from profile to close-up throughout.

The animation, in fact, is as controlled as it is frenetic, like a yo-yo going up and down, getting its string entangled and then somehow untangling itself . Porky sitting up in bed is particularly memorable, with his body stiffly shifting upward while his nightcap flails around, but the scene that most represents everything good about the cartoon comes after the cats kick Porky out and move in: There's a shot, which lasts for a few seconds, of all four cats lying about decadently (one of them is smoking four cigars at once, another one is trying without success to pour his liquor) and the animation of all four of them at once would make a classic Disney "Group Animation" scene jealous. If that weren't enough, there's a cut to each one individually doing their thing, and they do it even funnier.

After another showing of all four cats, Porky pops in through the window, and this is a sight to behold: The small size of the room plus the comparison with the cats makes Porky's angry face barging in a real intimidation. As he makes his entrance his head inflates and suddenly deflates and he climbs through the window. Crisp, fluid, and wild animation + Strange cutting and staging = Manic Cartoon Nirvana.

It doesn't let up from there - more of this goodness comes on as the cats escape from the house, terrified by Porky, and plot their revenge outside. I can't go on describing this stuff or my head will explode, but needless to say if there's a gag, a layout, a cut, or a bit of animation Clampett could squeeze in to knock your socks off, you can be sure he did it.

Rating: 7/7

As a choreographing job and portrait of lunacy, Great Piggy Bank Robbery has never been topped. The cutting, camera angles, backgrounds, and animation all work in harmony to bring the most believably zany Daffy ever to the screen. His personality is the story, he makes everything happen. Look at the length to which he gets worked up over a comic book, running all over the country side yelping with glee. Who couldn’t relate to his spastastic excitement over the panels of a Dick Tracy comic? The price of admission is totally worth it when he clasps his hands around his head and warns Dick of danger and leaps about in excitement when his hero wins. This is some of most engaging character animation ever, folks.

Everything Daffy does is, for lack of a better word, loony. Marvel at his lack of common sense when he punches the air and knocks himself into a dream of being ‘Duck Twacy’ (And at the end it looks as though he was sleep walking the whole time…). We are treated to a series of drab, gradient backgrounds (By the way, it’s amazing how the perspectives of the hills and that dream city and the negative space really put the focus on Daffy’s outbursts of motion) and lots of excuses for Daffy to do something plain ridiculous…He threatens to ‘pin it on ya’ behind his office door, has a phone conversation with himself, orders a taxi to follow that car and runs away, and does all kinds of other loopy, inane stuff.

Daffy’s dreamworld competes with him at lunacy, putting the gangster’s hideout in a really obvious location and giving him a trolley route straight there. It’s only funnier that Daffy plays up the pretense of seriously working to solve each answer that he gets on a silver platter. After the ridiculously large thug poking out a little hole, we get to…

The most intensely, inspired, lunatic sequence in WB-cartoon history (Possibly animation history, period), when Daffy encounters a gang of Chester Gould-influenced criminals, naming them off one by one according to their visual quirks. I won’t give even one of them away, but each shot brings something like a close-up or a grimace to highlight the threat of the villain, and some of them are hilarious not only in appearance, but in reaction to being singled-out by Daffy.

This further leads to a sequence with the right combination of bizarreness and light-heartedness as Daffy runs from all these criminals with cool shadow effects and escalating zaniness as he battles one after another, defeating some in an over-the-top fashion (It was out of character for Cartoon Network to air that machine gun scene. Guess it’s okay when you’re killing people with vegetables for heads) and others by their own physical quirks.

In a way this summarizes Bob Clampett’s whole career at Warner Bros. It’s almost a return to his black-and-white roots where he’d let loose with inspired surreal concepts and genre parodies, only now augmented with his ability to develop Daffy through many personality influxes while keeping him relatable and not detached as in his first few uses of the Duck.

As every cartoon fan probably knows, this was the single biggest inspiration for Spumco-founder John Kricfalusi and even though I like Stimpy’s Invention, Coal Black, and Corny Concerto a bit more than this (More outrageously-animated mayhem), it belongs in every cartoon-lover’s library.

Rating: 5/7

In Bacall to Arms movie-goers, newsreels, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and even Tex Avery's wolf are masterfully satirized. The satire reminds me of how the Simpsons would steal an event from a movie and mockingly play it out, although that doesn't exactly happen here. Instead Bogart and Bacall's styles of acting are lifted and placed in a movie-within-the-cartoon. They spend the entire "movie" flirting with each other, and you can tell whoever came up with their lines probably laughed his head off while watching the flirting scenes of their real movies.

You might expect this to date the cartoon a little. Surprisingly, it feels a lot fresher than most satire of this kind I've seen. It's more effective than even when I'm familiar with the source material, and I've never seen a full movie with Bogart or Bacall in my life (Yes, I'm an uncultured ****). That's probably because the cartoon is not content with merely caricaturing Bogart and Bacall, but having them do outrageous things like it was nothin' - like lighting their cigarettes with a blowtorch half their size and interacting with the theater audience.

The wolf fits in as a movie-goer who objectifies Laurie and does all kinds of crazy things, none of them based on the Avery wolf even if the motivations are similar. Instead of expressing his horniness with anatomically impossible actions (eyes falling out of sockets and that crap), the wolf reacts with extreme facial contortions and lots of hollering. And don't you just love how at the end, there's nobody watching the movie but the wolf? Only Duck Amuck could break the fourth wall more effectively without getting self-conscious.

Rating: 6/7

This is a unique cartoon, don’t get me wrong. But “unique” is not the same thing as “cartoon nirvana”, which Clampett delivered time and time again during his reign at Warner Bros. In fact, there isn’t a scene in here that brings me to cartoon nirvana.

Obviously Clampett knew this was going to be his last film, because he did a story where Elmer Fudd “quits” chasing Bugs Bunny. Elmer breaks the fourth wall, letting the viewers know he's in a cartoon. Instead of the occasional self-referential gag like, “all the things I’ve done to him in this picture”, this is full-blown self-conscious show-biz.

Unfortunately, it’s the kind of fourth wall breaking that makes me think of Tiny Toons. Which makes sense, because Tiny Toons was for the most part a total bastardization of Clampett’s style with excess dialogue and a bad sense of timing. Having said that, the self-conscious demeanor in Big Snooze works for launching some nice gags I’ll get to later, but I don’t like it for its own sake.

One gag in here that really doesn’t work out is the “run this way gag”. Take special note of that - It isn’t often I’ll say a gag in a Clampett cartoon absolutely doesn’t work (wasn’t the last time in my Hep Cat review?). Bugs runs in place in a wacky motion, tells Elmer to “run this way”, and Elmer trails behind Bugs running in the exact same wacky motion. Even if Bob Clampett was the first to use this gag, and even if it’s slap-happier than any other use, it’s still a very obvious pun, kind of like the gags in unremarkable episodes of Beany and Cecil. It sure as heck wasn’t any funnier when used in this Muppet Babies episode I saw back in the late 80’s.

Besides those two lows (well, they’re lows for Bob Clampett anyway), the rest of the cartoon is good enough. The gag where Elmer runs through a log a few times, each time running off a cliff courtesy of Bugs who spins the log around with his foot. I used to hate the gag, but began to enjoy it because it’s so self-consciously moronic (kind of like the death of the buzzard in Corny Concerto). And the show-biz demeanor is justified when Bugs rips out Elmer’s briefs as he walks away from Bugs, indignant head held up high.

Now, when I said this’ a unique cartoon, what I really meant was, it has a special gimmick. Not the fourth wall breaking stuff, the highly stylized dreamworld Bugs invades in Elmer’s head while they both nap. The dreamworld reminds me of scenery from Beany and Cecil with its fruity pastel backgrounds, but these backgrounds are more surreal with interesting layers of color, such as the rabbit outlines trouncing Elmer. Some nice gags arise in this scenery, like the wolves chasing after Elmer dressed as a mermaid. There are some other nice touches, like the “Nightmare” paint, which must have been a challenge to animate and really looks cool.

Having said that, none of the gags in here are as good as the really classic stuff (some of them are derivative as well, like the wolves’ ahooooing Elmer which was already in Book Revue), the good ones work more because they’re so slap happy, and the most original gags are stuff that directly interacts with the dream scenery (in fact, there are two gags in the dream sequence that are almost identical but with different climaxes).

Throughout the whole cartoon, I feel like I’m not watching much of anything, so it’s a testament to Clampett’s talent that it’s this enjoyable. There’s so much creativity in everything else that you can enjoy the mood and vibe it all creates. The cutting is amazing, an example being these dueling shots between Elmer’s tirade and Bugs’ reactions near the start, and the scene of Elmer tearing up his contract is animated strangely with Elmer drawn stretching up the screen at a grotesque skinny proportion only to get fatter as he reaches down to chuck the piece of paper. Seeing how they had to draw a lot of frames to get that effect, it couldn’t have been an accident. It reminds me of McKimson’s tendency to alternate character’s proportions as they move, only with more zest (..for lack of a better word).

There’s so much effort put in the window dressing the lack of substance doesn’t bring it down too much. It looks as though Bob Clampett wanted to do something special for his finale, and while it is special, every one he has done so far has been so in its own way. Big Snooze is a great selfconscious swan-song, but some stronger gags would have helped.