Duck Amuck (1953)
Directed by Chuck Jones
The short-tempered Daffy Duck must improvise madly as the backgrounds, his costumes, the soundtrack, even his physical form, shifts and changes at the whim of the animator.
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What critics compared Duck Amuck to
The movie incrementally becomes the nine-figure-budgeted superhero action movie equivalent of a Chuck Jones-directed Looney Tunes touchstone like “Duck Amuck.”
Riley’s dreams are produced in the cranial version of a TV studio; a trip through the blank spaces of abstract thought pays tribute to Duck Amuck , one of the greatest cartoons ever made; there’s even a pink, hobo elephant voiced by Richard Kind named Bing Bong.
We're talking "Duck Amuck" style surrealism in a few places.
That is a promising concept, I suppose—something like a sci-fi take on the classic Daffy Duck cartoon “Duck Amuck,” in which Daffy was at the mercy of a mischievous animator (guess who?) who changed the circumstances of his existence in a flash with increasing surreal results—but screenwriter Oren Uziel has no clear idea of how to implement such an idea.
At one point, he types commands, and she reacts like a puppet -- it's romantic manipulation at its most literal, as well as a grotesque variation on "Duck Amuck" (1953), in which Daffy Duck is tormented by his animator, Chuck Jones.
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Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (2020)
Directed by Cathy Yan
Themes
Remember the ending of that classic Warner Bros cartoon Duck Amuck, in which Daffy Duck is tormented by the hand of an unseen animator who keeps cruelly erasing and redrawing his reality (for instance replacing a parachute with an anvil)?
(Suffice it to say, if it had ended by stealing a page from the end of the classic cartoon ''Duck Amuck'' and having Bugs Bunny turn to the camera and say �Ain't I a stinker?,� that would have made infinitely more sense that what is offered up here.)
It has some of the greatest split-screen gags I've seen, the best of which, an extended drug trip, is "Duck Amuck" sublime.
But the promise goes unfulfilled, and the film is preceded by an equally disappointing 3-D Daffy Duck/Elmer Fudd cartoon "Daffy's Rhapsody," a grating, pushy comedown from the Olympian heights of "Duck Amuck" or the gorgeous and eternal "What's Opera, Doc?"