Plane Daffy (1944)

Directed by Frank Tashlin, "Plane Daffy" is a World War II Daffy Duck cartoon that is quite bizarre. Amidst some amusing rhymed narration by Robert C. Bruce, we feast our eyes upon a very sad squadron of Air Force chickens at their flight station, weeping for their lost comrade. It's up to Daffy, the "squadron woman hater", to deliver a secret military document and resist the flirtations of a slinky Nazi spy hen named Hatta Mari.Here are my favorite sequences from "Plane Daffy". Daffy ogles Hatta Mari's leg and then gets electrocuted by her kiss. When he escapes her hideout, he quickly returns, telling her, " Let's go back inside. It's scaaaary out there!" And I love the caricatures of Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels at the very end."Plane Daffy" is a cartoon that lives up to its title, because once Daffy winds up in Hatta Mari's hideout, the rest of the film is absolutely silly!

Frank Tashlin's 'Plane Daffy' is a wonderful wartime cartoon which is very definitely aimed at adults. Aside from containing three suicides and possibly the most cigarettes in any one scene in animation history, 'Plane Daffy' is based around the character Hatta Mari, a leggy blonde nazi pigeon who seduces military secrets out of carrier pigeons. This makes for an extremely sexually charged cartoon, quite literally in one case! Similar in many ways to the excellent Private Snafu cartoon rumours (which was written by Dr. Seuss), 'Plane Daffy' tells most of its story in rhyme, until Daffy finally arrives and the wisecracks get a little looser. Daffy, despite having top billing, doesn't appear in the cartoon until it's more than half way finished but when he does, he knocks the action up a notch from witty setup to lunatic conclusion.Professing to be a woman hater (!), Daffy nevertheless succumbs to Hatti Mari immediately, resulting in the longest animated screen kiss I've ever seen. Tashlin, always the Warner director who owed the most to live action techniques, treats Hatta Mari as if she were a real life screen goddess, never missing a chance to present a titillating angle of her top-heavy figure! The sexual tension between her and Daffy adds a new angle to an age-old chase format and Tashlin's direction is extremely energetic. Special mention must go to Warren Foster's script, which not only features the excellent rhyming narration ("relaxes" is rhymed with "enemy axis", to give but one example of the unpredictable wit on show) but several absolutely hilarious gags. My favourites involve a military-secret-dispenser and a fridge light. There are also lots of subtler in-jokes, such as the fact that Hatta Mari is not only a spoonerism of Matta Hari but also an old fashioned slang term for a loose woman (you get her pregnant, you hatta mari her! Get it?). 'Plane Daffy' is the Warner animation studio at its bawdiest and also, frequently, at its funniest.

While most of the WWII-era cartoons from Warner Bros. had the characters kicking Nazi butt head on - or at least contributing to the war effort back home - "Plane Daffy" takes a different approach. After several pigeons get seduced by female Nazi spy Hatta Mari and divulge national secrets, the army hires none other than the looniest of all ducks to deliver the secret. But when Daffy meets the woman, it's up to him.Obviously, when there's the risk that someone's trying to attack you, you wonder whom you can trust, or who might be a spy. Needless to say, they make it as funny as possible here. The truth is, I might have gotten tempted to spill the beans to a babe like that woman! But anyway, it's a really funny cartoon.Yeah, that's not a secret at all.

Frank Tashlin is not one of the first names that come to mind when discussing Warner Brothers cartoons. with Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett and Friz Freleng being more well-known. That's not a surprise at all. But it's a bit sad to think that the general public doesn't know more of him, particularly his work in animation. He worked, like many people, for more than one studio and also made the successful switch to live-action direction. A very talented man, to say the least. This short is vintage Tashlin and he handles the material perfectly. Everything here is great. The ending, where Goering and Goebbels suffer a momentary bout of candor that costs them dearly, is absolutely priceless! Hatta Mari is a precursor to Jessica Rabbit, as is Tex Avery's Red character. Only Mari IS BAD-as well as drawn that way! Pay particular attention to the scene in the squadron barracks when the commander displays her wanted poster. Marvelous short and well worth tracking down. Most highly recommended.