Bob Clampett's Truncated Oeuvre

Thad Komorowski on his site "Identifying Animators and Their Scenes" has posted his thoughts on Bob Clampett's merits versus those of Chuck Jones. He says he ranks only Jones above Clampett as a cartoon director, but that Jones is superior because he continued doing great work after 1946, while Clampett did not. (Clampett left Warner Brothers and pretty much abandoned theatrical animation).

Chuck is unique among Warner directors in that he continued to create watchable and sometimes even excellent cartoons well into the fifties. He was able to do both crazy forties stuff and also the more limited animation talky stuff later.

Like a lot of people who love Warner cartoons and grew up watching them on TV, Chuck was my first love. Bob left in the mid-forties, and none of the pre-48 stuff was aired on network TV. Chuck is easily the strongest of the three 50's directors.

But when I got a tape of "Bugs Bunny Superstar" in middle school and saw "A Corny Concerto" it immediately became my favorite cartoon. It was completely different than anything I had seen before. It was what Looney Tunes were always purported to be; completely insane. Chuck's cartoons aren't at all crazy and wild like Clampett's, and Friz and McKimson's had plenty of explosions and beatings and stuff, but they were often kind of ugly and boring. Clampett makes your skeleton want to leap out of your body.

I deeply love Chuck Jones cartoons, I love the witty scripts and the precise draftsmanship. Some of those Wile E. Coyote poses make me ache with my whole body because they look so good and so right, you can feel what they look like. Because Jones loved to do strong poses and his drawings looked so amazing it didn't hurt him as animation became increasingly limited. (Obviously UPA's style had influence everywhere, but WB budgets were continually shrinking for shorts after the war.) As Thad says, it's often claimed that Clampett's influence was what made everyone's cartoons so much wilder and fun and good-looking in the 40s. But like him, I have trouble accepting that it was just Clampett. Surely, much of the credit just goes to budgets being bigger and animation being fuller. I love "Little Red Riding Rabbit" by Freleng, I don't think it's significantly better writing than a lot of later Freleng scripts, but the drawings are a pleasure to look at, which is not always (or even often) the case with a lot of later Freleng pictures. Chuck's cartoons kept looking good because he had such a strong sense of pose and design.

So back to Clampett. As Milt Gray points out on his commentary track for "The Gruesome Twosome" animation in Clampett cartoons is fuller than anybody else at Warner's. I would love to know what he would have done if he stayed on, but it isn't obvious to me he would have continued to be brilliant, I think that if he left because of more limited budgets it might be legitimate artistic choice. I know that people rave about Scribner's work in "Hillbilly Hare" and I know that under McKimson he was probably reigned in, but it still has nowhere near the punch for me that Scribner does in a great Clampett cartoon. Would he have kept it up under Clampett? Maybe, but maybe the vibe and budgets at WB in the 50's were just never going to be conducive to that kind of full animation.

The shorter point I wanted to make was this: why should making "only" a dozen absolutely amazing cartoons in the forties make him less of a director than Jones who made some brilliant ones in two different decades? Orson Welles directed very few great movies, would a director who made more over a greater span of time clearly be a better director?

The other thing I wanted to say was that Thad implies that Jones was good at two things, full and limited animation, while Clampett was only good at the former. But Jones's animation was never as full as Clampett's, so I'm less convinced.

With all that said, I'm not even going to claim that Clampett is the superior director, only that I wouldn't demote him for the reasons cited.