Porky in Wackyland

1938
Dir: Bob Clampett

Adrian Danks, Sense of Cinema:
In September 1938, Clampett released his eleventh cartoon for Warner Bros. This seven-minute film, Porky in Wackyland, is in many ways both an exemplary and typical early Clampett cartoon. The initial establishment of the story's world is both economical and rudimentary, the real “fun” occurring once Porky traverses the boundary line that announces, “Welcome to Wackyland: It Can Happen Here!” Such a flimsy barrier between worlds is typical of Clampett's work at Warners, though such a clear demarcation becomes less common in the more freewheeling and extreme work that dots his last four years at the studio. Inspired by Lewis Carroll's adventures of Alice in Wonderland, as well as the canvases of Picasso and Dali, Clampett takes Porky on a journey into a surreal, abstracted landscape in which the logic of our – and commonly Porky's – world is reversed and transcended: a rabbit swings on his own ears; a rubber band marches by; a dog and cat are physically conjoined; a criminal holds bars in front of his face to prove his incarceration; and the Do-Do [that] Porky is hunting lifts up the backdrop of the scenery to escape, zooms into the foreground on the Warners shield, and intermittently appears to attenuate the animation with his own pencil. He becomes one of numerous characters in Clampett's cartoons whose “inner” psychology or nature is reflected and refracted onto his body and surroundings.