My Favorite Duck (1942)

Director:

Chuck Jones

Writer:

Michael Maltese (writer)

Release Date:

5 December 1942 (USA)

Genre:

Family | Animation | Short | Comedy

Plot:

Porky tries to relax on a hunting and fishing trip, but Daffy, smugly pointing out the "No Duck Hunting" signs...

Plot Keywords:

Daffy Duck | Film Break | Porky Pig | Looney Tunes | Surrealism

Cast

Mel Blanc

...

Daffy Duck / Porky Pig / Eagle / Baby Eagle (voice) (uncredited)

Runtime:

7 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Company:

Leon Schlesinger Studios

Quotes:

[as Porky chases Daffy around a tree, the film breaks; after a moment, Daffy steps out]
Daffy Duck: Ladies and gentlemen, due to circumstances beyond our control, we are unable to continue with this picture. But don't worry, I'll tell you how it came out. Porky is chasing me around and around that tree. He corners me, and moves in for the kill. Everyone thinks of me as a dead duck. Then I launch a counter attack. I shower him with lefts and rights. I come in for the coup de gracie. And Porky's crawling, literally groveling at my feet.
[...]

Movie Connections:

Featured in Behind the Tunes: Animal Quackers (2003) (V)

Soundtrack:

Blues in the Night

Brilliantly subversive anti-western.

'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!