This is the crazy Daffy, having more or less his last gasp. I prefer the later version, but this one’s certainly going out with a bang. His French song, for instance. Also, he says this:
“Why the copious flow of lachrymose fluid, my garrulous canine?”
Weren’t we just talking about not reducing vocabulary, just because kids were around?
That freezer blows like in the exteriors of an arctic picture. As previously mentioned the WB sound effects are endlessly admirable. Daffy’s scat singing is also funny. At one point he bedevils the dog with a staggering array of quickly graduating puns, jokes, non sequiturs, intertextual references. Jonathan Winters properly gets cited all the time. But is this where Robin Williams comes from? Again, the crazy Daffy, and he can sure be exhausting. That velocity though, the outlandish connections and juxtapositions, can sure be exhilarating.
Of course, and this is something that you get with a lot of Bob Clampett’s bursting cartoons, this Robin Williams-like spontaneity is actually being accomplished in the midst of the most labourious process that you can possibly imagine.
All of this film’s violence is interestingly off-stage/screen. Another time it won’t be, so it’s not really a moral decision. It’s a stylistic one though, and more of why this mere product is so much more than that. Almost always interesting! The running-around-with-a-hatchet sequence—wholesome media, for the entire family!—happily echoes that hilarious Lorre/Leopold bit in Birth of a Notion (q.v.)