In case you didn’t see Journey 2, you can watch a iPhone recording of the new CGI short, Daffy Duck’s Rhapsody online. I’ll keep my comments brief this time, since I covered a lot of the same ground in my previous Looney Tunes CGI post.
This short is at least as well animated, designed, and rigged as I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat. It also has some genuinely funny and expressive moments, along with some awfully confusing ones. (The banjo-playing, anyone?)
Because the Daffy novelty record is a staple of Looney Tunes culture in a way the Tweety & Sylvester one is not, just about everyone who ever heard and loved the song has played out an animated version of it in his or her head. I strongly suspect what the team did with this short was nowhere near as energetic as any fan’s fictitious version, exposing the limitations of CGI in a way the Tweety short didn’t.
As good as the CGI animation is, Blanc’s vocals demand this piece to be animated either highly distorted and over-posed (Clampett) or stylized with fewer drawings (Tashlin). They do a fine job of channeling Jones-type poses/reactions throughout the cartoon, which is something I thought would be impossible to achieve in CGI. So perhaps CGI hasn’t quite peaked, even if a lot of the major CGI studios certainly have.
(Speaking of vocals, it’s a little shabby only Mel Blanc gets top billing here. Yes, his voice is the star, no question, but Billy West is able to do something Blanc never could do: a near flawless approximation of Arthur Q. Bryan’s Elmer Fudd voice.)
“Because the Daffy novelty record is a staple of Looney Tunes culture in a way the Tweety & Sylvester one is not, just about everyone who ever heard and loved the song has played out an animated version of it in his or her head. I strongly suspect what the team did with this short was nowhere near as energetic as any fan’s fictitious version.”
That was a point I tried to make in my Facebook review, but I was never sure how to word it properly.
There are some actions in the short that don’t make sense, as you mentioned, like the banjo-playing sequence. But, one moment that bothers me is why on the lyrics, “Hunters to the right of me”, is Elmer shot upward into the sky. That makes no sense to me.
I wanted to ask Billy West at Emerald City Comicon about working on this short, and if he knew why he didn’t get billed with Blanc, but I could never get to him.