Sound in Animation

My all-time favourite animated cartoon short is the 1953 film Duck Amuck directed by Chuck Jones. Similar in aesthetic significance to Porky in Wackyland (1938), Duck Amuck exploits the potential of animated cartoons in a rather extreme fashion. One of my favourite parts has everything to do with sound. About two minutes in, Daffy is completely erased, then asks ‘All right, wise guy: where am I?’ He is redrawn in a cowboy outfit and holding a guitar. He attempts to strum and sing, but gets no sound. After he holds up a sign requesting sound, we get sounds…all of them comically wrong: machine gun fire, a car horn, and a donkey. Daffy smashes the guitar and leaves the frame for a moment, then comes back without any costume. He attempts to say something, but instead of Daffy’s voice, we hear the cock-a-doodle-doo sound of a rooster, followed by other animal noises. Eventually, however, Daffy’s eyes glow red and he looses his temper, and he shouts that he has never been so humiliated in all his life. Sound is now back to normal. While this sort of extreme audiovisual dissonance can be found in non-animated film, it works particularly well in cartoons.

Another excellent example of a similar contradictory nature is found in Tex Avery’s Daffy Duck in Hollywood (1938). About two-thirds of the way through the short, Daffy gets loose in a film library and splices several film clips together. After he has replaced another film with his own, we are treated to a series of short clips which are funny, not in themselves, but because of the contradictions between sound and image. First there is mention of happy legionnaires, bathed in glorious California sunshine, passing in review — but we see a shot of the soldiers marching in heavy rain…with rather stoic faces. Among other such comical contradictions is a reference to swinging jitterbugs in a hot dance contest…but with an image of an elegant eighteenth century court dance. We also get a description of a very brutal fight, but the boxers we see in the shot just stand in the ring doing practically nothing.

Another one of my favourite cartoon shorts is Duck! Rabbit, Duck! (1953), the third of Chuck Jones’s celebrated ‘hunting trilogy’ featuring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Elmer Fudd. After the opening credits, we see Daffy pulling down ‘Duck Season’ signs and burning them as firewood. At the same time, we hear pit-orchestra music accompanying while Daffy is singing/lisping ‘La Vie en rose’, but we are not given any crackling ember sound effects for the fire. Nor do we do ever get any territory sounds or elements of auditory setting. This absence of territory/environmental sounds, as well as a focus on Daffy’s singing rather than the fire, significantly contributes to the feeling that we are viewing a fictional animated world rather than the world we live in. Non-musical sound effects tend to be very sparse, and, in this film, largely limited to gunshots (though there are some others, such as when Daffy is pulling signs off of trees). Occasionally, there are amusing sound effects which line up with visual cues, such as the moment about two minutes into the short after Elmer informs Daffy that he ‘[hasn’t] got a wicence to shoot a fwicasseeing wabbit’: we hear a warm metallic boing as the black-dot points of Daffy’s eyes rapidly bounce back and forth (Daffy obviously is irritated to find Elmer so short on brains). After the boing has settled, we hear a bassoon on cue when Daffy shifts his eyes to one side. Since sound effects are sparse (for instance, there are no sounds of footsteps), music often takes over the role: when we see any character such as Daffy or Elmer walking, the music is rhythmically lined up with their steps. Music in this cartoon (like so many other cartoons) is also often used for its symbolic value. Earlier in the short (during the opening credits) we heard hunting horns, thus immediately telling us that this is a hunting picture and not a film about movie studios (such as Daffy Duck in Hollywood, which features tunes that are traditionally associated with Hollywood). This hunting horn motif significantly returns later on in the short. But all in due time… When Daffy has learned that Elmer hasn’t got a licence to shoot a fricasseeing rabbit, he sits down to write one out himself. However, Daffy has to ask Bugs how to spell fricasseeing. While Bugs innocently (or not so innocently) spells FRICASSEEINGDUCK, we hear the pit orchestra playing ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’, thus conjuring the image of a diligent student answering a teacher’s question during a spelling lesson — or a spelling bee…in any case, Daffy is the one who gets stung. After getting his bill shot off and taking another look at the licence he gave Elmer, Daffy realises his error and acknowledges that he’s the ‘goat’. Thus starts a sequence (which returns later in the short) of several animal names cropping up, always to Daffy’s disadvantage. Every time Bugs holds up a sign showing us what season it is (Goat Season, Dirty Skunk Season, Pigeon Season, etc.) we hear the hunting horns again. Very quickly we become conditioned to this horn call as a trigger which inevitably precedes Daffy’s bill getting shot off into a hilarious position.