Looney Revue, Part 1 1929-1931: Bosko, Foxy and Piggy

To say that the early days of Warner Brothers' animation studio is a far cry from their most iconic contributions to film is a hefty understatement. You'll not find much as visually inventive as the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons, or as witty as the Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons, in the films of Bosko or Buddy, but Warner had to start somewhere. And that “somewhere” was formulaic Disney imitation, animated by former Disney employees. Steamboat Willie (1928)'s success had solidified a market value in the then-new innovation of sound cartoons, and animators Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising pitched a short pilot, a four minute cartoon titled Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid. 

The live-action / animation hybrid features Ising sitting in a chair next to a drawing board, talking to his creation, Bosko. With a rubbery body and wide expressive eyes, black hands and feet with a white body it's pretty easy to see a likeness to Mickey Mouse. But while Mickey's actions were accompanied by a high-pitched childlike voice, Bosko's voice is an exaggerated Southern “Negro boy” accent. In old black & white cartoons, the high contrast blacks and whites works well for animating animals – which is probably why they were a favourite of the era – but in depicting a black human, his appearance reeks of blackface. The pitch reel is a lazy retread of earlier, more inventive cartoons featuring animators interacting with their creations, such as Winsor McKay's Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) and Max and Dave Fleischer's extraordinary and overlooked Out of the Inkwell (1918-1929) series starring Koko the Klown. Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid features just a couple minutes of Bosko singing and dancing for the camera, but it was enough for businessman Leon Schlesinger to see the potential in in the theatrical shorts business, with Walt Disney's thriving business and lack of major-league competition. Schlesinger landed a deal with Warner Bros, and Harman & Ising came up with the title Looney Tunes. While it's impossible today to look at iconic Warner Bros characters and not have the Looney Tunes name spring to mind, the title's origins are uninspired, as Harman & Ising clearly just took a thesaurus to Disney's long-running Silly Symphonies series.

Audiences were fortunately spared Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid, which wasn't made publicly available until 2000. The world's first taste of Looney Tunes was Sinkin' in the Bathtub, released April 19, 1930. Bosko's racist accent isn't as prominent as it was in the pilot, but it's still there, and seems to come and go to varying degrees throughout his films, which displays an uncertainty by Harman and Ising in just how racist they wanted their character to be portrayed. His voice is slanted towards the Mickey-falsetto. The short is airy and plotless, as it follows Bosko in various mini episodes, each one too brief to leave a lasting impression. Much of it features Bosko singing and dancing with various objects-come-to-life, from his bathtub to trees. There is escalating danger in the final portion, as Bosko and his girlfriend Honey (an obvious Minnie Mouse clone) ride a broken train and try to avoid peril. Like all the Bosko shorts, it's competently story-boarded and animated, but Harman and Ising continually display no interest in breaking any new ground. They developed a specific Disney house-style in the 1920s while working for their former employer, and spent their time at Warner in the early 1930s making the same animations – only now set to music from Warner's vast music library. The problem is, animation was such a young art form in the earlier decades of the 20^th century, and evolving more with each passing year. Harman and Ising were making money for Schlesinger and Warner Brothers which allowed them to create cartoons for them for several years, but the cartoons themselves were basic audience-pleasing cinema filler. Sinkin' in the Bathtub ends with Bosko walking toward the camera from behind a Looney Tunes sign, telling the audience, “That's all, folks!”, which might be the most iconic contribution Harman and Ising made towards actual Looney Tunes cartoons; a closer WB would use for the decades to follow, made famous later on by Porky Pig.

Cartoons are commonly padded for time with repeated movements to string along a sequence, which also cuts back on the labour of animating. The best animation makes clever use of repetition to highlight comedic moments (think of Chuck Jones' Duck/Rabbit Hunting Trilogy). In Congo Jazz (1930), the second Looney Tunes short, the use of repeated animation is the antithesis of what Chuck Jones would later do. Bosko crouches through the jungle, gun in hand, hunting for animals. He walks with the same crouching motion many times, as the backdrop slides along. A tiger walks slowly behind him, mimicking Bosko's body language. When Bosko discovers the tiger, a chase ensues, with both characters essentially running in place while the terrain moves along, which barely shows any variation in aesthetic. At least Sinkin' in the Bathtub feels like it's in continuous motion, with the character moving through several locations, and acting along various parts of the frame. Congo Jazz often feels like characters are locked in place throughout the film's first half, performing only a couple different motions ad nauseam. The film livens up a little in the second half when Bosko has a change of heart and befriends the animals in the jungle one by one, culminating in a dance party in the final minutes. It's a cute twist on the hunting genre, but disappointing to see a lack of connective tissue in this final act, as it cuts from sequence to sequence, each one showing a couple animals dancing. There is no larger composition, or any sense that all these characters are even inhabiting the same area. Each clip feels detached from the rest. And in the dancing, each animal is moving in the same repeated motion. There's even an unfortunate racist angle in Congo Jazz when Bosko meets monkeys, who are drawn to look just like him, only smaller.

The Booze Hangs High (1930) begins innocently enough, with Bosko frolicking on a farm with animals. The first half consists of scenes that fall under the following categories: Bosko dancing by himself, Bosko dancing with animals, animals dancing by themselves. There is a lot of dancing in Bosko cartoons. Two piglets save the cartoon at the four minute mark when they cork open a bottle of booze (by using their corkscrew tail, of course) and get drunk. After their approving father also gets drunk, the bottle is thrown, and cracks over Bosko's head, getting him drunk as well. The short is made worthwhile, when the adult pig - in the middle of singing - stops to vomit a corn-on-the-cob. Looking embarrassed, he opens up his stomach and places the corn back inside his body. This is an early taste of the familiar Looney Tunes wackiness that would become associated with the name.

The success of the Looney Tunes shorts allowed Schlesinger to start up a second ongoing film series from Warner Bros., this one titled Merrie Melodies. The plan was for Looney Tunes to feature the star characters, while Merrie Melodies would lean towards one-shots, and incorporate the WB musical library more. Over the years, the line between Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies would blur, and by the mid 1940s they were indistinguishable from one another. But in 1931, they were noticeably separate. Hugh Harman supervised the Looney Tunes cartoons, which starred Bosko, and Rudolf Ising supervised Merrie Melodies, which debuted August 1931 with a new original WB character, Foxy, in Lady, Play Your Mandolin!. Bosko may have obvious similarities with Mickey, but Foxy is as much of a Mickey ripoff that's likely ever been conceived by a major film studio. Foxy's ears are fluffed and he has a bushy tail, which is the only physical difference he has from Mickey. Watch a Foxy cartoon from a distance or while squinting your eyes and it's easy to mistake it for a - sub par - Disney short.

In Smile, Darn Ya, Smile! (1931), Foxy is a trolley engineer who has to navigate his train against many obstacles. There's even an appearance from his unnamed girlfriend, a Minnie Mouse stand-in. There are several cows-blocking-the-train-tracks gags which are lifted from the previous year's Sinkin' in the Bathtub, note for note. The final set-piece with the train speeding downhill and its brakes not working, then cutting to Foxy screaming and the camera moving towards his open mouth which fills the entire frame, is copied from the same Bosko cartoon. This one abruptly ends with Foxy waking up in bed, having dreamed the entire scenario. Foxy is an enthusiastic character, his body always swaying to the soundtrack, just like Bosko dancing his way through life. The constant cheeriness occasionally switching to panic in times of peril is the only semblance of personality Bosko and Foxy possess.

One More Time (1931) features Foxy as a police officer beating up criminals, handing out speeding tickets, and engaged in car chases with gangs. The animation is routine and unremarkable, but it does make interesting use of music. Nearly the entire short is set to the title song, with several characters uttering variations of "One more time" (such as "one more fine", "one more crime") while pleading to Foxy to let them go. After 3 films in 3 months, Foxy was retired, and never seen in another Looney Tunes or Merrie Melodies.

Bosko the Doughboy (1931)'s shakeup on the Bosko formula makes it a character standout. Bosko finds himself a soldier in the trenches of World War I, at first shaken and disturbed by the horrors surrounding him. Looking at a photo of Honey, he regains his composure, and cheers up the troops around him through song and dance, briefly distracting them from the war, but also inspiring them to keep their heads up. Bosko's bubblegum personality is an interesting fit in this setting, as his frequent need to cheer up those around him makes a grim sort of sense in a war picture. Bosko the Doughboy is a somewhat challenging cartoon, with its morbid humour and parody of wartime violence. Characters are literally blown apart with bullets and bombs while animated in the usual Disney-lite Harman & Ising style. There are gags built around the violence, such as gunfire blasting away a soldier's torso, causing his head to fall several inches on his lower torso, as he walks away okay, only significantly shorter. The animation is interestingly, a little livelier than the average Bosko cartoons, as it frequently changes backdrops, has numerous character interactions that do not rely on repetition, but rather, crafting original interactions for each set of characters. And the action enters the frame from every angle, sometimes the entire screen is engulfed in gunfire and smoke all at once. Patriotic wartime shorts were a popular genre for American animation studios during World War II, but it's fascinating to see a short like this made at roughly the halfway point between the two World Wars.

Having scrapped Foxy, Ising wanted a new star for Merrie Melodies, so changed the species from fox to pig and came up with Piggy (and girlfriend Fluffy), this being the third variation on Mickey and Minnie that Harman and Ising ran with in two years. Piggy debuted in You Don't Know What You're Doin' (1931), and despite its generic characters, it's actually a solid cartoon. Set in a nightclub, it has little plot, but takes advantage of the location to build a cartoon around musical performances, and crowd animations. Its music is quick, which helps the animation move, too; its enthusiastic pacing more convincing than in the previous Bosko and Foxy films. The best moment is near the end when a drunken Piggy leaves the club and drives an inebriated car which has sprung to life, and the two joy-ride together across a city which has come alive to the music, the streets bobbing up and down to the soundtrack while Piggy and the car try and keep up. Buildings and telephone poles also gain sentience, having a drunken demeanor similar to Piggy and it all adds up a dazzling disorienting couple minutes of film. Like Foxy before him, Piggy was not a success and dropped after a couple cartoons. The seeds had been planted for a pig leading character, but wouldn't surface again until 1935 when Porky Pig debuted.

Note: I will not be watching every single Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies film, only the ones made easily available across the essential DVD and Blu-ray video compilations (Golden Collection, Looney Tunes Super Stars, Chuck Jones Mouse Chronicles, Platinum Collection, Warner Archive's Porky Pig 101) 

Historical information in this and following installments come from three invaluable sources:
Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons, by Leonard Maltin
Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in its Golden Age, by Michael Barrier
Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons, by Jerry Beck & Will Friedwald