Daffy Duck Hunt Takes

Bob McKimson is notoriously known for “calming down” his animators once he became a director at Warner Bros. in the ‘40s. McKimson had been handed animators from the Bob Clampett unit, whose drawings were the least calm of any at the studio. After all, McKimson’s kind of animation involved intricate acting and that’s what he wanted out of his animators, though he also seems to have been obsessed with action in perspective just for the sake of it.

Still, the spirit of Clampett occasionally shone through. “Daffy Duck Hunt” (1949) contains a few takes that would be right at home in a Clampett cartoon, even with the absence of Clampett’s most outrageous animator, Rod Scribner.




Manny Gould, John Carey, Chuck McKimson and Phil DeLara were the credited animators here. Gould left the studio after a few more cartoons and the remainder were all immersed in the comic book industry within a few years.

The cartoon also features a couple of scenes of heads poking toward, and filling, the camera, with arms thrashing around. McKimson seemed to love this kind of stuff and had Gould do it in this cartoon, according to copies of studio records in the hands of Thad Komorowski. That phase seems to have lasted as long as McKimson had animators who could handle it.