Art by Accident

This was first posted in September of 2003. And if you haven’t read Chuck Jones’ Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist, you really need to.

The news of Donald O’Conner’s death prompted me to have a 2 Blowhards kind of moment the other day. As everyone knows, O’Conner was one of the leads in the classic film Singing in the Rain, arguably the best musical Warner Brothers ever made. It’s now clear that Singing in the Rain is an outstanding work of art—but that was far from clear to its creators when they made it. The movie was intended to be a sort of revue—a retrospective of songs used in previous WB movies over the years, all wrapped up in a light-hearted romp. They did it for love, they had a good time, they pleased themselves—and somehow they created a work of art.

Much the same is true of the classic Warner Brothers cartoons. Chuck Jones makes it clear in Chuck Amuck that they weren’t trying to create anything timeless. They had to produce a certain number of cartoons of a precise length to accompany the studio’s live action releases. In general, Jones and his compatriots got little if any feedback on their cartoons. So they produced cartoons to suit themselves, and never worried much about how they’d be received. On the contrary—an edict come down from management that they were not to make cartoons about bullfights, because bullfights weren’t funny. They immediately realized that bullfights must have untapped comic potential if management was agin’ ’em, and made Bully for Bugs.

They never guessed how enduring and timeless their work would be…and yet the Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoons have been pretty much continuously on TV for my entire life. (The latest development is a new Duck Dodgers TV show featuring all new cartoons.) The best of these cartoons are clearly works of art. And again, that it’s art was completely unintentional.

Works like Singing in the Rain and What’s Opera Doc? are art by accident; and yet they are among the most charming, delightful, and timeless works of art of the 20th century.

What happened to elevate these works above their near-relatives? Why are they different? Was it luck? Was it the attitude—one might even say, the humility—of the creators? (I lean toward this view; An American in Paris has some fabulous moments, but overall it’s a much weaker film than Singing in the Rain—and it’s much more self-consciously arty). Did the fact that they were group efforts play a role?

What do you folks think?