Cartoon storytelling, part one: "Porky's Party"

Despite its seemingly loose and unfocused story, Porky's Party (1938) is a very well-structured cartoon.  Let's take a look at it.

Bob Clampett and his team take a few seconds to establish the setting, then approximately the first third of the cartoon (two and a half minutes) to set up the three main elements.

The setting: Porky Pig's birthday party. 

Element 1: Porky gets a silkworm as a present, who will make clothes whenever you instruct him to "sew".  Sometimes these clothes are embarrassing.

Element 2: Porky's dog, who, as Michael Barrier puts it in Hollywood Cartoons, is "ridiculously and thus appropriately" named Black Fury, gets drunk on hair grower after watching Porky applying some to his scalp.

Element 3: Porky's two party guests are a gluttonous penguin and a goofball goose.

Each element is introduced in a separate sequence, but they flow together nicely.  They are also set up in advance - Black Fury is around from the start of the cartoon, and before Porky applies the hair grower he says he's getting ready for "the others".  They are also arranged well - the hair grower sequence could have come before the silkworm delivery, but putting it afterwards means it breaks up two sequences at Porky's front door, and gives Black Fury more screen time, and a shorter gap before his next appearance later in the cartoon.

OK, now that the elements have been introduced, it's time to start elaborating on and combining them.

Element 1 (Next Level):

The next scene builds on the silkworm element.  He not only makes clothes when you tell him to "sew", but when he hears someone say the word "so". (Porky describes Goosey as "so silly")  Not only does he make embarrassing clothes, but, since he's making them from Porky's inside pocket, he makes the situation even more embarrassing by making it look like Porky's wearing them.

Element 1 + Element 3 (Next Level):

Porky throws the silkworm away and it lands in the penguin's ice cream, so now we get to combine his tailoring skills with the penguin's gluttony, as the penguin keeps finding garments in his ice cream and then, escalating the situation, inside his head.

The penguin gets furious as a pop-up top hat keeps changing the shape of his head, and Goosey is brought into the mix, trying to fix the penguin's problem through comic violence - ramming his head against the wall, hitting him with a mallet, and trapping him under a large metal bucket.  This also builds on the "guests" element by having them interact with each other.

It isn't clear whether the penguin has accidentally consumed the silkworm, or just the things the silkworm made inside the ice cream, but in the audience's minds, the silkworm story thread is now happening inside the penguin's head, and that's how it will continue when we return to it.

Element 2 (Next Level):

Now we've explored elements 1 and 3 to their full potential, it's time to check up on Black Fury before the audience forgets about him.  By now his actions from earlier have reached their "natural" conclusion: he's guzzled down most of the hair grower and is covered in shaggy hair.  In a drunken stupor, he daubs shaving cream on his face and spooks himself with an electric shaver, causing him to flee the bathroom in panic.  Thus, we now have a dog who's disguised, foamy-faced and not of sound mind to combine with the other elements.

Element 2 + Element 3:

Porky is the character we've gone the longest without seeing, so it makes sense that he's the first to encounter Black Fury in his new state.  Clampett isn't letting any of his juggling balls drop.  Porky thinks Black Fury is a "mad (i.e., rabid) dog" and he and his guests make a run for it.  When we last saw him, the penguin was mostly just angry and frustrated, but Clampett hasn't forgotten about his gluttony either, so we get a quick gag of him returning for his slice of cake in the middle of his escape.

The next minute or so is spent with Porky and his guests trying to hide from the unrecognised Black Fury.  This sequence foregrounds the penguin, who gets the most individual actions.  Porky and Goosey operate as a single unit, doing little more than running and hiding together, while the penguin disguises as a coat-rack, batters on a door and gets flattened, and eventually gets into a terrified fight with Black Fury in a fold-away bed.

The resolution may seem a bit abrupt and unexplained, but I think Clampett gets away with it because, following the rising action, it *feels* like the right place for a resolution.  Following his fight with the penguin, Black Fury has evidently lost his excess hair (and we do see some chunks of fur flying from the scene) and the foam on his face.  The cast assembles as Porky points out, "it was only Black Fury all along!"

Element 1 + Element 3, in response to Element 2 + Element 3:

With the dramatic action concluded, it's time for a quick coda to end the cartoon on a comic note.  The penguin, no longer afraid, winds up to give Black Fury a punch.  "So!" he says.  

Although we can't see the silkworm, the same pizzicato string motif plays on the soundtrack from the worm's earlier appearances, so we know what's going on.  Building on the previous two clothes-making scenes, the silkworm (now explicitly inside the penguin's head) now produces more and more garments at a much faster rate than before, eventually wrapping the penguin up in mummy-like bandages.  Goosey resumes his earlier role and clobbers the penguin over the head again, ending the cartoon with a comic physical impact.

Check the cartoon out for yourself, either on the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 3 DVD or... elsewhere.  Do you agree with my assessments?  What, if anything, would you change about the cartoon to improve it?  (I have a couple of small ideas, but I'd prefer to wait and see what other people think.)