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Animated Personalities: Cartoon Characters and Stardom in American Theatrical Shorts

2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 7; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/studamerhumor.7.1.0232

2333-9934

Rick Cousins,

Cinema and Media Studies

When you write about cartoons, it's a testament to your work if part of an old Looney Tune pops into your reader's head. David McGowan's trailblazing book Animated Personalities triggered for me, of all things, a memory of Elmer Fudd admonishing Sylvester to act his age. This odd recollection strikes at the heart of McGowan's central thesis: the rational part of my mind knows that Sylvester is a cartoon character and therefore “acts” whatever age and whatever way he's drawn. Instinctively, though, I feel that there is a way that Sylvester and any other cartoon character I'm familiar with ought to act and that he therefore needs to be admonished for breaking character, even by as feeble an authority figure as Elmer.Questions concerning character are ultimately questions concerning authority: as Daffy Duck once put it, “Who's in charge here?” For McGowan, the answer isn't cut and dried. An animated character's lack of agency is almost self-evident, but in many ways it parallels what their “colleagues” in live-action films had to endure. Even as rugged a comic individualist as Groucho Marx wore a mask that was shaped by outside forces—writers, directors, studio bosses, censors, and the expectations of the filmgoing public.Of course, Groucho's persona was well established and well known before he entered the movie business, limiting the extent to which his film bosses could alter it. Whether flesh and blood like Groucho or pen and ink like Krazy Kat and other comic strip luminaries, figures with preestablished celebrity gave film studios readymade publicity tools but left them with few options for altering these figures to suit their purposes. Manufacturing their stars from scratch offered studios more control, and McGowan draws detailed and insightful comparisons between the processes involved in custom building star personas for live-action and animated films. Both types of personas had off-screen lives: fan magazine “interviews” and “as told to” biographies chronicling the exploits of Felix the Cat, Mickey Mouse, and Betty Boop were a knowing wink at the public's assumed sophistication and a case study in the changes wrought in studio publicity by increasing in-house censorship. Before the Motion Picture Code took full force part way through the 1930s, Betty and Mickey could drop hints about their amorous liaisons; afterward, Mickey was publicized as a simon-pure boy next door, and Betty fell silent in the trade press.The fact that these magazine pieces weren't written by anyone involved in the day-to-day making of cartoons foregrounds their subjects’ status as collaborative creations. McGowan's dissection of the collaborative nature of the manufacture of animated and live-action film icons underscores the oft-forgotten truth that no single individual can take credit for “discovering” Rita Hayworth or Red Hot Riding Hood. Even so, his otherwise cogent analysis of the relationship between animators, directors, characters and audiences overlooks one of its key aspects. While individual authorship claims for cartoon characters are often specious, there is ample evidence to suggest that the brainstorming teamwork that occurred within individual animation production units could produce vastly diverging interpretations of the same character: Bugs Bunny in a Robert McKimson–directed cartoon circa 1950 is visibly and audibly not playing the same kind of role as he is in a cartoon directed by Chuck Jones. McGowan's blind spot in his section on character creation is perhaps the result of an overreliance on Roland Barthes's “Death of the Author” as his main analytical focus. While Barthes's tightly focused view of audience reception and authorial input provides a compact and readymade all-purpose investigative tool, it lacks the precision, flexibility, and capacity for depth found in the more nuanced and multifocal paradigm offered earlier in the twentieth century by Mihkail Bakhtin's essay “Author and Hero.”However, it's not with matinee idols like Rita Hayworth that McGowan finds the strongest parallel between the lot of live-action stars and that of the animated star. Quite unsurprisingly, it's with the silver screen's buffoons. McGowan acknowledges a theoretical debt to others who have identified a strain of comedic praxis connected with the unique personalities of silent-era and early sound-era comedians and who have noted its influence on Hollywood cartoons. McGowan's application of these notions concerning what has been termed “comedian comedy” to the world of the seven-minute cartoon short makes for a chapter's worth of absorbing reading in Animated Personalities. Unfortunately, though, it does little to address this body of theory's two major limitations, namely, a tendency to devalue the work and possible influence of those not considered to be part of a loosely defined pantheon of live-action and animated comedians and a tendency to reduce a given performer's wide comedic repertoire to a single iconic role. Just as Sylvester is equally believable as a harried paterfamilias and a conniving schemer, so too is W. C. Fields.A note or two of regret for roads not taken in Animated Personalities scarcely detracts from the usefulness of the roads it does take. In fact, some of its most useful roads lead through territory that McGowan himself wishes had been better explored. Drawing on an impressive array of animation and film scholarship, he offers several close readings of received opinion in both fields and is not hesitant to point out when he believes an influential idea has perhaps outlived its usefulness. For McGowan, the most dangerously powerful of these ideas is the prevailing wisdom that narrative cinema and character-based animation are essentially incommensurate. For him, the degree of constructedness inherent to both forms makes them subsets of the same larger whole rather than distantly related entities. One compelling notion that McGowan explores is that because all film consists of a series of images played in rapid succession, anything that moves on the screen can be invested with a personality by the viewer. That goes for Norman McLaren's frame-by-frame painted streaks and dots, Oskar Fischinger's mesmerizing geometric forms, and even a hair caught in the projector, as animated to comedic effect by Tex Avery.If an animated hair had become one of the cartoon world's most beloved characters, it might have had to get a military cut during World War II. McGowan's chapter on Hollywood's use of its cartoon characters during the war years reveals some advantages that animated stars had over their live-action counterparts as tools for propaganda. Donald Duck could entertain the troops without having to risk life and limb touring the front; his patriotism would only be briefly called into question if it formed part of a cartoon's plot, as in Der Fuehrer's Face or The New Spirit. Whatever other ways cartoon stars might emulate Charlie Chaplin, they were never allowed to imitate his World War II–era pacifism.Also unlike Chaplin during and after World War II, our hypothetical animated hair would never have gone grey. As with the dead film stars whose posters still can be found on college dorm room walls, cartoon characters can attain a form of apotheosis that reaches far beyond anyone's control. Animated Personalities concludes with two chapters that track animated stars through what could be termed their afterlife. The first of these is a survey of the effects of television on animated films and on the concept of cartoon stardom. Cartoons packaged for syndication on TV offered the same challenge to the ongoing careers of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck as movies on the late show did to Bette Davis and James Cagney. The familiarity and intimacy afforded by home viewing combined with the saturation of repeat broadcasts had a dual effect: while it kept the names and images of film stars alive in the public imagination, it also tended to crystallize older versions of those images as so-called definitive ones. Studio-sanctioned network programs such as The Bugs Bunny Show reacted against this trend but at the same time capitalized on it, acting as vehicles for more recent theatrically released material, while celebrating and affirming the traditions represented by older work.The second chapter in the concluding section of Animated Personalities tackles a question that was occasionally addressed in jest by studio-era cartoon shorts: do cartoon characters have a life cycle? Positioned as a coda to the argument of the book, McGowan's discussion of whether toons can be born, age, and even die in the same way as their live-action counterparts is brief but thought provoking and suggests avenues for further and more extensive study. One of these avenues is signposted by the maxim that maturity in the cartoon world is decidedly fluid. Sylvester may get told off by Elmer Fudd for not acting his age or shamed for immature parenting by his paper-bag-wearing son, but for other characters age isn't even a number. Mickey Mouse or Porky Pig could be just as much a child or an adult as was necessary for the plot of any individual film, as could Harry Langdon, Jerry Lewis, Lou Costello, or Harpo Marx. Although this is only one of many possible directions from which scholars could branch off the trail that McGowan has blazed in Animated Personalities, the question that one future book might ask is “why don't some cartoon characters ever act their age?”