Same bones—different lengths only
If our work was academic, so, let it be said, was Picasso’s. Our characters are based on individual personalities, their anatomy abstracted only in the most general way from their prototypes—rabbits, ducks, cats, canaries, etc.
We must all start with the believable. That is the essence of our craft. All drama, all comedy, all artistry stems from the believable, which gives us as solid a rock as anyone could ask from which to seek humor: variations on the believable—that is the essence of all humor. We can be even more precise. Yes, humor is always based on human behavior. In animation this is clearly demonstrated. All great cartoon characters are based on human behavior we recognize in ourselves.
Characters always came first, before the physical representation. Just as it is with all living things, including human beings. We are not what we look like. We are not even what we sound like.
And so it was and is with Bugs and Daffy, Elmer, Porky, and Pepé Le Pew. What they look like grew in each case from our discovery of who they were. Then and only then could their movements and voices uniquely demonstrate each of these personalities. And as it is with human beings, the voice does not make the character. The character develops the kind of voice necessary to express his individuality.
Animated characters grow and evolve, just as human beings do. Perhaps Bugs Bunny in his earliest appearances somewhat resembled Harpo Marx. After which he passed through a Woody Woodpecker stage (before Woody), on to a Groucho Marx stage, and finally settled comfortably down into a quiet-living rabbit, similar, as pointed out earlier, to Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins, with overtones of Dorothy Parker playing D’Artagnan. Left to his own devices, Bugs would doubtless live a life of contemplation and pursue intellectual matters. But, as in the case of most of us, the society around him seems dedicated to contradicting his wishes and ambitions. Seemingly secure in his rabbitat, he is constantly accosted by enemies bent on doing him hurt, or sending him off in rockets, exposing him to the enmities of fanatics like Yosemite Sam, whose simple hatred of all rabbits creates conflict.
But once the battle has started, once provoked, our quiet-living rabbit becomes a living terror, and happily and cheerfully joins the conflict. “Of course you realize this means war” is not an idle statement.
All our characters are recognizable not only by their personal characteristics but by how they express these characteristics in response to conflict or love or any adversarial situation.
So, in the same or similar situation, each will respond in a unique and typical fashion. This is where the challenge, the fun, and the professionalism of the artist or the animator come into play—a challenge not to be taken lightly by anyone.
The great wonder of animation is not the illusion of life but life itself. Our characters achieve believability because of their limitations. As mentioned earlier:
There is no such thing as sympathy without believability; there is no such thing as real laughter without sympathy.
Developing an animated character is very much like getting married. You must learn how to get along together, and you must show great patience and understanding about what you can and what you cannot do, to bring the individual best out in each character, be it Bugs, Daffy, or any other of the characters we developed at Warner Bros.
When you are engaged in full animation, or in character live-action comedy, the character takes over, pushes you aside; you become the interpreter of his actions. You are no more a cartoonist in the static sense than Chaplin was a still photographer. You respond to another personality, moving it as it needs to go—as it must go. Drawing becomes as unconscious a necessity to you as body mechanics are unconscious to the dancer during the performance. You cannot practice mechanics during a performance, because you are now the life force, the moving response. You are the interpreter of actions which surprise both you and the character you vitalize; you and he together become the series of surprises that is animation.
As you develop any character, you are, of course, looking into a mirror, a reflection of yourself, your ambitions and hopes, your realizations and fears. Chaplin could only have found the Little Tramp within himself. Gazing at or trying to analyze other tramps would have done him no good at all. There is that little tramp in all of us; it takes a great artist to bring it fully to the surface where we can all recognize it. Just so with Daffy and Bugs and Elmer and Tweety Bird and Yosemite Sam. If there was comic artistry at our studio, it formed itself into these varied aspects of the human character through group effort or, rather, through unconscious group effort. But it could be brought to final and unique life as an individual only by an individual, and that individual responsibility rested on the director.
Like the Little Tramp, there is a self-serving, the-world-owes-me-a-living, I-want-not-only-my-share-but-a-reasonably-greater-share-than-you Daffy Duck in all of us. Just as there is an I’m-going-to-only-if-you-interfere-with-my-shooting-wabbits appeal to the audience, and as a Grinch hates Christmas, so Yosemite Sam, who hates rabbits, arouses in us a sympathy. We’d all like the freedom to seriously, loudly, honestly, publicly state our hatred of something. Pepé Le Pew presented no problem to me. I needed his self-assurance, his absolute certainty of his male desirability, his calm self-assurance, his logical interpretation of any female peccadillo as simply a loving way to convey her love for him. So Pepé was not a recognition in myself of his wonderful attributes but an absolute recognition in myself of the absence of those traits. I needed Pepé in the same way that I needed Bugs (nothing heroic in my
