'My Favorite Duck' may seem to be little more than a variation on the classic Bugs Bunny model, wherein an elusive creature, more normally thought of as easy prey, interminably torments his slow-witted hunter. And boy can Daffy torment, a whirligig irritant, managing to be in all places at once, on land, air or sea, in every conceivable position, at every conceivable angle. The thing is, Porky is no Elmer or Sylvester, he wishes Daffy no harm, he just wants relaxation and solitude in the great outdoors, as promised by decades of American Western mythology. Daffy goads him out of his solitude, his apathy, forces him to take action (he is a dark subconsious sprite mocking our unsociable, isolationist, private ideals), just as a year earlier, America was shocked into entering World War II.
Daffy is the black to Porky's white, they are inseparable - without Daffy, Porky seems incomplete; with him he turns from a peace-loving, nature-seeking dolt into a fearsome murderer, whose inexorable forward drive, fuelled by anger and righteous vengeance, has all the brute force of an army, so powerful that it bursts open the frame, destroys the world of the film, that vast Western expanse, the very reel itself, turning our two protagonists, who are of course mere lines, into ghosts, playacting at movement, life. We many be over-familiar with such self-reflexivity now, but think back to 1942, the year of 'Casablanca' - it must have been unnerving, especially coming from Hollywood.
'My Favorite Duck' is directed by Chuck Jones, one of the great directors, and he relishes the darkness, the playfulness, the formal implications of the story; the paradox of turning a rigid square frame into a site of insane movement and endless possibility, while at the same time reducing the vast Western outdoors, that mythic site unsullied by history, where a man can be free, of people, of his past, is narrowed, Leone-like, into a claustrophobic space, where you simply cannot get rid of that deuced awkward, protean Other (this is signalled earlier on in an establishing shot, where the landscape looks curiously like a duck's mouth).
Amid all the gleeful carnage, there are two standout, gravity-defying sequences, which turn emblems of easy-going bourgeois Americana into nightmare scenarios, devoid of security or perspective by a mere flip, where the breaking of the laws of physics encourage rupture in the laws of property and identity; as a snoozing angler finds himself suspended from a sea-turned-sky, hurtling to his own imagined self, or joining his perfect home flying into space, exact in every reassuring particular except it's grounded on air. Magic!
Daffy is the black to Porky's white, they are inseparable - without Daffy, Porky seems incomplete; with him he turns from a peace-loving, nature-seeking dolt into a fearsome murderer, whose inexorable forward drive, fuelled by anger and righteous vengeance, has all the brute force of an army, so powerful that it bursts open the frame, destroys the world of the film, that vast Western expanse, the very reel itself, turning our two protagonists, who are of course mere lines, into ghosts, playacting at movement, life. We many be over-familiar with such self-reflexivity now, but think back to 1942, the year of 'Casablanca' - it must have been unnerving, especially coming from Hollywood.
'My Favorite Duck' is directed by Chuck Jones, one of the great directors, and he relishes the darkness, the playfulness, the formal implications of the story; the paradox of turning a rigid square frame into a site of insane movement and endless possibility, while at the same time reducing the vast Western outdoors, that mythic site unsullied by history, where a man can be free, of people, of his past, is narrowed, Leone-like, into a claustrophobic space, where you simply cannot get rid of that deuced awkward, protean Other (this is signalled earlier on in an establishing shot, where the landscape looks curiously like a duck's mouth).
Amid all the gleeful carnage, there are two standout, gravity-defying sequences, which turn emblems of easy-going bourgeois Americana into nightmare scenarios, devoid of security or perspective by a mere flip, where the breaking of the laws of physics encourage rupture in the laws of property and identity; as a snoozing angler finds himself suspended from a sea-turned-sky, hurtling to his own imagined self, or joining his perfect home flying into space, exact in every reassuring particular except it's grounded on air. Magic!
