Daffy Duck tries to evade the draft in Draftee Daffy.
It’s World War II, and everyone is signing up; everyone, that is, except Daffy Duck, who espouses patriotism in the opening moments of Draftee Daffy, but once summoned by the Draft Board, changes his tune to “it had to be me.” Brilliantly animated by Rod Scribner, and directed by Robert Clampett, Draftee Daffy is an insidiously subversive commentary on mid 1940s social values, which finds Daffy trying every means possible to kill “the little man from the draft board” who keeps attempting to deliver Daffy’s induction notice.
When I spoke with animator John Kricfalusi — the creator of Ren and Stimpy — years ago for an interview, we bonded immediately over our shared admiration for Clampett and Scribner as an “unbeatable team” when it came to classical Hollywood studio animation; the plastic possibilities of the medium are clearly pushed to their limits in this 7 minute cartoon.
Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell wrote a great essay on Clampett’s work, which you can see by clicking here, which deconstructs this classic Warner Bros. cartoon in detail, along with other examples of Clampett’s contribution to the history of animation. I’m struck by the freedom of imagination that this cartoon, and other Clampett/Scribner collaborations, demonstrate — an anarchic vision that seems to be almost complete absent from the hyperrealist motion capture 3-D style now in vogue in the Pixar films and related projects.
