The Best Looney Tunes Cartoons That Still Hold Up Today

Porky Pig's Feat Opened Up A Whole New Style Of Animation

Frank Tashlin became one of the most beloved comedy directors of Hollywood's Golden Age, bringing cartoon chaos to his movies with stars like Jerry Lewis and Jayne Mansfield. He came by his style naturally. Before he brought cartoon language to live-action movies, he brought cinematic language to Looney Tunes.

Before Tashlin, cartoons didn't really do much with the camera, since they only needed to leave it stationary to photograph two-dimensional drawings lying flat on a desk. Tashlin opened up new possibilities, simulating complex shots and dynamic camera angles. And few of his cartoons did this as well as Porky Pig's Feat.

In this cartoon, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck try to escape from a hulking hotel manager who holds them prisoner until they can pay their bill. This sets up a series of hilarious gags as they try to get out, and they're all the more hilarious for the way Tashlin presents them. There's one dizzying long shot of the hotel as Porky and Daffy swing out on a bedsheet rope, all the way into the camera. In another, Tashlin simulates a mobile live-action camera as the manager falls down the stairs, following him as he goes before revealing the long way he still has to fall. In yet another, we get an extreme close-up of the manager threatening Daffy but still get to see Daffy's reaction as he's reflected in the manager's monocle.

Draftee Daffy Is Looney Tunes Animation At Its Most Animated

Most viewers today think of Daffy Duck as the ultimate loser, but he began as Warner Brothers' first stab at a Bugs Bunny-style trickster hero. In the '30s and '40s, he hadn't evolved into Bugs' opposite yet. If anything, he was Bugs but more so, even more full of manic energy and rebellious anarchy.

That was never truer than in the cartoons directed by Bob Clampett. In Draftee Daffy, Clampett offers the best of both worlds, making Daffy the fall guy for a more competent adversary but using the little black duck's manic energy to make his suffering even funnier.

In this wartime adventure, Daffy celebrates the news of another Allied victory by putting on a song and dancing alone in his house. But he changes his tune pretty quick when he gets a letter informing him he's been drafted into the Army. Soon, Daffy's visited by the unassuming "little man from the draft board" and starts concocting increasingly elaborate plans to get away from him.

The implacable little man is the perfect enemy for Daffy, the immovable object to his unstoppable force. While Daffy frantically flails in every possible and impossible direction — there's a running gag where he literally throws off sparks — the little man hardly moves, simply materializing wherever Daffy runs to. And Clampett's animators beautifully capture Daffy's manic energy, turning him into a living liquid that can stretch three or four times his height every time he jumps.

Bad Ol' Putty Tat Shows Sylvester And Tweety At Their Finest

Bad Ol' Putty Tat opens with a beautiful illustration of the combination of subtlety and in-your-face comedy that makes Looney Tunes so great. The camera slowly moves down Tweety's barbed wire-covered birdhouse to reveal the mangled and very angry Sylvester below. It's a moment of cartoon violence that's all the funnier for only existing in viewers' heads.

There's a similar moment later where a hilariously goony badminton player, who bounces along like he's dancing to the score, mistakes Tweety for a badminton birdie. We see Sylvester pull out a club, the man walks off-screen, and at just the right moment, we hear a thud! And Sylvester reemerges wearing his clothes.

Earlier, Sylvester gets around Tweety's home security by using a corset as a trampoline, which backfires when Tweety turns out to be ready for him, and the hapless cat keeps getting bounced back into his clutches so Tweety can clobber him with a series of different weapons. Director Friz Freleng's mastery of timing is on full display here as Tweety pauses from his diatribe with Sylvester whenever he falls out of sight, giving the rant an almost poetic rhythm. And we can't forget sound effects maestro Treg Brown's hilarious byoo! sound for the trampoline that ties the whole thing together.

Rabbit Of Seville Cartoonifies A Classic Opera

By 1950, the Looney Tunes crew had been making Bugs Bunny cartoons for a decade, and it must've been hard to find new ways to keep them fresh. But in Rabbit of Seville, Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese used the familiarity of the formula to their advantage by combining it with the world of opera, where the performers follow the same steps every time. In this parody of Gioachino Rossini's The Barber of Seville, Elmer Fudd chases Bugs Bunny into an opera house, which Bugs turns into an opportunity to humiliate the hunter in time with Rossini's music.

The whole cartoon is sung through until Bugs' final line, "Eh, next," and the opera framework makes the old formula new again. In the climax, Jones almost seems to be making fun of the whole thing, as Bugs and Elmer keep running on and offstage to threaten each other with bigger and bigger weapons. And given that the Cold War arms race was going on at the time, it's hard not to imagine Jones and Maltese had some real-world absurdity in their sights, too. Rabbit of Seville is also a great showcase for Bugs' evolving personality, as he stays totally cool through all the destruction he causes, making for a hilarious contrast.

Hillbilly Hare Builds To One Of Looney Tunes' Longest And Funniest Gags

After Bob Clampett left Warner Bros. in the 1940s, his unit went to star animator Bob McKimson, who kept his mentor's manic energy alive until the studio itself shut down in the early '60s. McKimson is often overlooked in comparison to his peers, but Hillbilly Hare proves he can tickle your funny bone with the best of them.

This one sends Bugs to the Ozarks, where he gets caught up in a feud with hillbilly brothers Curt and Punkinhead Martin. There's a lot of good stuff here, but things really take off in the second half, which McKimson and writer Tedd Pierce devote to one long, hysterical set piece. Dressing up like a pretty girl, Bugs lures Curt and Punkinhead into a dance hall. They square dance along with the song on the jukebox until Bugs, in one fluid, beautifully animated motion, changes out of his dress, unplugs the jukebox, and pulls out the fiddle he stashed on top of it. Bugs makes up his own dance, and Curt and Punkinhead follow as he leads them across the country and convinces them to horribly mangle each other, expressions of hilarious confusion on their faces all the while. The gag keeps building for around three minutes, and in all that time, it never runs out of steam.

A Bear For Punishment Turns Father's Day Into A Bloodbath

Not every Looney Tunes cartoon features a beloved star. After all, the series was sold to theaters solely on the Looney Tunes name, freeing up creators to tell standalone stories and try out new characters. And those include the dysfunctional family in A Bear for Punishment -- hulking "Junyer," tiny, angry Paw, and deadpan Maw.

A Bear for Punishment starts out serenely, which is always a good sign things are about to get very, very wild. We get a nice, long scene of the three bears peacefully sleeping until dozens of alarm clocks go off to wake up Junyer for Father's Day. But all of Junyer's "gifts" end up very badly for Paw, who gets sliced up, blown up, and soaked by the cartoon's end. 

But the real hilarity is in the understated reactions — Paw's nervous laugh as he sees Junyer about to step on a roller skate with a tray full of food, Maw covering Paw's cake with a shroud after Junyer shaves him with a dull razor, and the shots of Paw's enraged and baffled reactions to Junyer and Maw's recital. That recital provides the cartoon's funniest moment, as Maw performs an incredibly acrobatic tap dance routine, all without once dropping her permanently bored expression.

Feed The Kitty Will Make You Laugh And Cry

In Feed the Kitty, a dog named Marc Anthony adopts a little kitten and tries to hide it from his owner. He finally stows it in the flour ... just as his owner gets a cupful to bake cookies. The owner then throws Marc Anthony out, and even though we've seen the kitten escape, Marc Anthony watches in horror as he imagines it being chopped up, rolled out, and sliced up.

The dog never says a word, so the animation has to do a lot of work, and it's more than up to the task. In a classic scene, Marc Anthony watches through the window as all kinds of horrors visit what he thinks is the kitten, his expressions getting more hilariously grotesque every time we cut back to him. If it looks familiar, director Pete Docter confirmed on the Monsters, Inc. DVD commentary that it inspired the trash compactor scene.

Exaggeration makes for great comedy, but it can also heighten emotions. Chuck Jones makes the dog and cat's relationship real and meaningful in very little time, and when Marc Anthony's huge, red eyes start to fill with tears, yours might, too. But one of the most powerful moments is also one of the smallest, as Marc Anthony's owner offers him a kitten-shaped cookie, and he tries to let it ride on his back like the real kitten did, then breaks down crying.