I would hope that in 2021, saying that bullfights aren’t funny wouldn’t be as controversial as it apparently was in 1953, when Eddie Seltzer, the businessman heading the Warner Bros. animation department, said it to Chuck Jones as the latter happened to be doodling a bull on a whim.
Bully for Bugs (1953), lauded as one of the greatest cartoons Chuck Jones ever directed, was born from the animation crew wanting to stick it to the boss they hated, by ‘proving’ through the art of moving drawings that bullfighting was comedy gold. There’s just one problem with that claim: bullfighting, as it is in the real world, is far from comedy gold. And sure, you can dress it up and santisise it, make a joke out of the whole thing, but that’s kinda the problem – Bully for Bugs doesn’t even try to really take the horrors of this bloodsport seriously, turning what’s essentially glorified animal abuse into eight-minute laugh bait.
Am I being too hard on this short cartoon from the 50s? I don’t reasonably think so, but let’s actually explore what this thing is about, and why I’m iffy about it.
The cartoon opens in a bullfighting ring (presumably in Spain, the country people tend to associate bullfighting with), as crowds cheer and a fanfare blares. (Chuck Jones and his team apparently visited a real bullring to record these sound effects. Kind of a chilling mental image, the more I think about it.)
A lanky, self-important matador stands before us, looking at the audience and snorting as if we’ve just been scraped off the bottom of his shoe. The doors blast open to reveal a huge, angry black bull, and after a bit of comedic build-up, the matador cowers as the bull chases him around the ring, much to the amusement and jeers of the in-universe audience.
Enter Bugs Bunny.
So anybody who’s seen enough Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies will know that Bugs Bunny took the wrong turn at Albequque and somehow ended up in Spain, don’t ask how the hell that even works.
The bull then confronts Bugs, the latter smacking the bull on the nose before the bull headbutts him straight outta the ring. This means war, you know the rest.
Bully for Bugs isn’t the first cartoon to portray a rather santised, crude depiction of a bloodsport, nor was it the last. Picador Porky (which I believe was the first cartoon featuring Mel Blanc’s voice acting) was as early as 1936, and Disney made Fedinand the Bull popular in 1939 (yeah, it existed before the Blue Sky feature film.)
So why am I dissecting this tortured bull carcass specifically? Because Bully for Bugs was made purely as a response to Seltzer’s comment about bullfighting not being funny, thereby somehow ‘proving’ that you can make humour out of anything, even stabbing animals for shits and giggles. And this cartoon recieved an Oscar, so people clearly adore it, despite its implications. Say what you will about Eddie Seltzer being a moron with no real knowledge of how animation works (the dude, for whatever reason, thought that spamming the colour purple would make scenes funnier because purple was inherently a funny colour for some reason), but when he famous said those immortal words ‘I don’t want any cartoons about bullfights, bullfights aren’t funny’, maybe, dare I say it, he was right.
I mean, let’s really think of it this way – in what world is forcing a frightened animal into an arena where they have no means of escape, where they’ll be slowly killed in front of thousands of people who find this shit hilarious for reasons that are entirely beyond me, finally dying of blood loss, shock or exhaustion, whichever comes first, having their body parts taken as a trophy – ‘funny’ in any sense of the word? Am I just without a sense of humour, or is it reasonable to not find the act of killing animals for fun peak comedy?
That a group of animators went out of their way to spite Selzter somewhat reminds me of how defensive anti-vegans bend over backwards to eat as much bacon, steak and chicken wings as possible and host BBQs outside people’s houses purely just to prove their own self-assured superiority.
And yes, I hear you. It’s just a cartoon. But the fact that its a series of drawings photographed in succession to provide the illusion of movement for eight minutes doesn’t mean it gets a free pass from criticism card. The Censored fucking 11 were ‘just cartoons’, they’re still racist, they still rightfully get called out. Obviously audiences don’t think that bullfighting is exactly like how its portrayed in Bully for Bugs, since in the actual events the bulls rarely, if ever, get a sporting chance at kicking the shit out of their abusers, and when they do, they don’t bow to the audience who cheers and throws roses at their feet. Their fate is far less glamorous and involves a bullet.
Since I’ve shat on this cartoon for long enough, maybe I can at least say something positive about it. It is, after all, well animated and does have some gags that make me chuckle here and there. The design of the bull is expressive and I’ve always adored Chuck Jones’ sense of humour and timing. There’s a certain gag where the bull swallows a gun, enabling him to fire shots from his horns. This backfires (literally, lmao) when he ingests an entire box of gunpowder. I’ll admit that’s pretty damn funny.
What seperates Bully for Bugs from other bullfighting cartoons that preceded it is just that, though – that aforementioned sense of realism, not just in the bull’s design that makes him seem far more like a real animal than the speherical, noodle-legged bovines seen in the mid 1930s, but the sense of timing, and the fact that all of the sound effects are actually recorded in bullrings themselves. It just has this chilling undertone. Somehow I don’t think audiences would be laughing at this shit if it was making comedy out of organised dog fighting or some other cruelty which people generally rally against, but given that most humans have as much empathy and compassion for cows as they do a piece of dog shit lying in the gutter, I guess bullfighting is just fair game, free from any discomfort.
It does some as some consolation that the bull in this cartoon doesn’t seem to completely be cast aside or regulated to the one-shot villains category – he does have a brief, um… cam-moo-oh (kill me) in Who Framed Roger Rabbit at the beginning, and unlike in real life, cartoon animals are immune to death.
The issue of animal rights was never really addressed or explored much by 1953, the only films which had attempted to ask uncomfortable questions about humanity’s abuse and exploitation of other sentient beings were Disney’s Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942), the latter having a far more philosophical tone to it and having far-reaching implications to the point that it’s regarded it as a gateway film for veganism/vegetarianism. Warner Bros., by contrast, only wanted to make funny cartoons, and largely succeeded, even though it sometimes, no, very often came to the point where they made humour of things that should have never even been considered funny in any context. Wagon Heels is quite possibly the most poisonous piece of anti-indigenous propaganda I’ve ever seen, but in 1945 the subject of Native American genocide and colonialism was great comedy bait for white people. To my dying day I will never understand why it was included as part of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection boxset when other racist pieces of trash like Tokio Jokio (1943) and Jungle Jitters (1938) were omitted.
Look, all I’m saying is maybe some things just aren’t appropriate as cartoon gag laugh bait. Bully for Bugs doesn’t prove that bullfighting is a cute vaudeville act where the bulls seemingly consent to their fate and perform pratfalls, but it does prove that anything can be tarted up and passed off as humour if you santise it enough, and are insensitive enough about the implications.
This is the one time I will stand with Eddie Seltzer on this.