How sad is this?

Great Film overall

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

My Favorite Duck (1942) **** (out of 4) One of the all-time greatest animated shorts finds Porky Pig going out to the country for some rest and relaxation but instead he runs into Daffy Duck who wants to make sure that pain and torment is all he gets. MY FAVORITE DUCK is without question one of the funniest animated shorts ever made because there's just so much great action and I'd argue that neither Porky or Daffy were ever better than what we get right here. It's hard to pick out one or two favorite scenes because the entire short is just one bit of greatness after another. If I was forced to pick a highlight it would probably be the sequence where Porky finally snaps, burns to a crisp and then starts his revenge. The film manages to be downright hilarious at times and the level of violence is just priceless.

This is an amusing cartoon, which (as was pointed out in another comment on this thread) was taking a typical Bugs Bunny - Elmer Fudd situation ("Peace and welaxation at wast!", said Elmer in one very similar earlier cartoon), using Daffy Duck and Porky Pig as the alternates. At this point in time (1942) Elmer was still in a period of change in shape and features, sometimes fat and sometimes with a red pickle shaped nose - and sometimes referred to as "Egghead". But Porky Pig's basics had been laid down by the late 1930s (originally he too was immensely fat, but gradually his rotundity was made more acceptable). Daffy and Bugs went through alterations too, though not as extreme as Porky and Elmer. Both the duck and bunny were anarchistic and malicious, but Bugs had demonstrated a cleverness and control over the world that lasted until the end of every cartoon. Bugs is a master of his universe (much to the discomfort of such foes as Elmer, Yosemite Sam, Wile E. Coyote ("Genius"), and the Tazmanian Devil. Daffy due to personality problems never is such a master, and the conclusion of this cartoon demonstrates it.Porky is going on a hopefully restful vacation in the wild, but he finds Daffy tagging along to annoy him at every possible moment. This includes preventing him from putting his tent up anywhere on land, and even stealing his food. But the real ace up Daffy's sleeve for most of the cartoon is that it is not Duck hunting season, so nothing can be physically done to harm Daffy by Porky in retaliation for what Daffy has been doing.It is a good trick - unfortunately it doesn't last. Daffy suddenly finds that it is now Duck hunting season, and (moreover) he in particular is to be targeted for destruction. Daffy finds he is in serious danger from an enraged Porky.The ending of the cartoon was actually slightly reused years later in a Bugs - Yosemite Sam cartoon, where the film seems to break and we are unaware of what happened to the two characters. It is symbolic of Bugs mastery of his universe as opposed to Daffy's attempt at mastery that Bugs gets the better of Sam, while Porky gets the better of Daffy.

Porky Pig is out for a camping trip in the woods when he comes across a crazy duck. Porky's patience is pushed to the limit but, as Daffy points out, duck hunting season is closed and it's a $500 fine for even hurting a duck…..a fact that Daffy is happy to exploit.Daffy is one of my favourite characters mainly because I like him in almost all his incarnations – be he the crazy duck or the bitter, twisted duck. Here he is the manic crazy duck who goes hooting over the horizon, and it works well. The plot sees Daffy just trying to wind Porky up, the film does what you expect it to and the punch line is pretty obvious.However the actual action is very funny and is totally made by a great performance from Daffy – he sets the mood of the film. The downside of the film is the animation quality on the characters themselves. Porky looks really basic and like he was drawn without as much care and attention as normal, but Daffy looks fine and the backgrounds are all OK.Overall this is a great short if you are a fan of Daffy in his manic state. Crazy ducks = good fun in my book, so I really liked this!

'My Favorite Duck' may seem to be little more than a variation on the classic Bugs Bunny model, wherein an elusive creature, more normally thought of as easy prey, interminably torments his slow-witted hunter. And boy can Daffy torment, a whirligig irritant, managing to be in all places at once, on land, air or sea, in every conceivable position, at every conceivable angle. The thing is, Porky is no Elmer or Sylvester, he wishes Daffy no harm, he just wants relaxation and solitude in the great outdoors, as promised by decades of American Western mythology. Daffy goads him out of his solitude, his apathy, forces him to take action (he is a dark subconsious sprite mocking our unsociable, isolationist, private ideals), just as a year earlier, America was shocked into entering World War II.Daffy is the black to Porky's white, they are inseparable - without Daffy, Porky seems incomplete; with him he turns from a peace-loving, nature-seeking dolt into a fearsome murderer, whose inexorable forward drive, fuelled by anger and righteous vengeance, has all the brute force of an army, so powerful that it bursts open the frame, destroys the world of the film, that vast Western expanse, the very reel itself, turning our two protagonists, who are of course mere lines, into ghosts, playacting at movement, life. We many be over-familiar with such self-reflexivity now, but think back to 1942, the year of 'Casablanca' - it must have been unnerving, especially coming from Hollywood.'My Favorite Duck' is directed by Chuck Jones, one of the great directors, and he relishes the darkness, the playfulness, the formal implications of the story; the paradox of turning a rigid square frame into a site of insane movement and endless possibility, while at the same time reducing the vast Western outdoors, that mythic site unsullied by history, where a man can be free, of people, of his past, is narrowed, Leone-like, into a claustrophobic space, where you simply cannot get rid of that deuced awkward, protean Other (this is signalled earlier on in an establishing shot, where the landscape looks curiously like a duck's mouth).Amid all the gleeful carnage, there are two standout, gravity-defying sequences, which turn emblems of easy-going bourgeois Americana into nightmare scenarios, devoid of security or perspective by a mere flip, where the breaking of the laws of physics encourage rupture in the laws of property and identity; as a snoozing angler finds himself suspended from a sea-turned-sky, hurtling to his own imagined self, or joining his perfect home flying into space, exact in every reassuring particular except it's grounded on air. Magic!