The Bear that Wasn't (1946/67)

I'm sort of amazed that anyone still remembers the Looney Tunes.  That kind of goes double for the fact that a group of some of the most iconic rogues gallery of characters in the history animated cinema is still able to maintain a great deal of recognition not just from long time fans, but also from ongoing generations of newcomers.  Something like that has got to be a testament to the staying power of genuine Art.  If that weren't the case, would any of us still be talking about films like Pinocchio, or Snow White and the Seven Dwarves all these years later?  The fact that make-believe figures like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, the Road Runner, and Wiley Coyote are able to take on a life of their own (the strange kind of half-life afforded to figments of the Imagination that sometimes makes them seem more real than reality) must also say a great deal not just about how we relate to the Arts, but also to the world around us.  It's with these thoughts in the mind that I'd like to look at one of the later products from the creators of Bugs and Daffy.  The Bear that Wasn't is a story from the mind of Frank Tashlin.  He was one of the original creators of the Tunes, way back when.  Tashlin worked on all of this comedy gold as part of a collection of animators looking for work as the idea of cartoon pictures began to take on a life of its own in the industry.

Tashlin himself was born in the Weehawken section of New Jersey in the early 1900s.  From what little is known about his personal background, I can't help but get the sense that we're dealing with one of those wayward class clown types.  These are the guys (they're most often guys) who for one reason or another find trouble fitting in to the usual social hierarchies assigned to them by their parents and teachers.  They tend to get along with their fellow kids as peers, more than they do the world of adult responsibility.  I think George Carlin gave a pretty good description of this type in one of his stand-up routines.  "Most of the time, in class, I was tempted to "Fool around, man"...You'd be bored and figure, well, why not deprive someone else of their education?  And you would set about disrupting the class by "attracting attention to yourself".  That is the name of this job, you know?  It's called "Dig Me"!  It was like, "Hey guys, didn't make the team, but bleurgh"!!!  They'd say, "Hey, he's crazy, man!  Hey, you wanna go to a party"?!  Yeah, you went to all the parties.  You got the last girl, but you went to all the parties...When I would try to attract attention in class I wasn't really like a very daring, bold youth.

"I was a little timid, really.  I didn't get right into fake epileptic seizures in the aisles, you know.  You'd just start out and test the water a little bit (web)".   He was speaking from his own personal experience, here, yet I can't help thinking that if Tashlin ever heard these words spoken aloud, he'd have been able to identify with pretty much all of it.  That's because what Carlin said about Class Clowns is just as good a description of Tashlin as it was of himself.  With that said, it just makes sense to me that Frank was the kind of brat who was willing to be flat out stupid crazy enough to fake a seizure if meant a chance to play hooky.  That's the best I can give you on this guy's character, anyway.  It should come as now surprise that he dropped out of high school early on, and promptly began a successful career of drifting from one odd job to another.  With guys like Tashlin, things can go either way.  You either find your niche (the one that helps you to scratch that ever nagging, restless itch, that causes you to act out so many times) or else you remain a kind of walking-taking non-entity drifting your way through life.

In Frank's case, he turned out to be one of the luckier Class Clowns.  He discovered (perhaps to his own surprise) that his skills with drawing and illustration could come in handy with a bunch of independent companies that were sprouting up across the country.  These companies were in this business of making and distributing some new-fangled contraption known as "moving pictures".  Some of them were even interested in seeing if they could take drawings on pieces of paper, and make them appear to come to life with a bit of camera trickery.  Whatever the hell all that was, those guys were offering good money, and so Tashlin took up his first professional job in showbiz.   Perhaps to his own surprise, he found the niche he'd been looking for.  The then burgeoning world of cartoon animation took him from working for John Foster on an animated theatrical short series known as Aesop's Fables.  Then, in his own obvious way, Tashlin found himself drifting into the employ of Leon J. Schlesinger, a film producer working at and for Warner Bros. studios.  Schlesinger is one of those major players in cinema history who seems forever doomed to never get as much credit as he deserves.  The complicating factor here is that he's also one of those guys who goes out of their way toward making that very easy to do.

Schlesinger is the man with the most over-arching credit for giving us the Looney Tunes.  He was the guy that the studio commissioned to set up Warner Bros. first animation unit.  It was by no means the first ever created.  It also wasn't anything like the second in line after the big breakout success that Walt Disney had with the creation of Mickey Mouse.  For whatever reason, yet to his own credit, studio head Jack Warner decided to take Walt's success seriously enough to decide to try and see if his own people could maybe find a way to compete with the newly minted Mouse Kingdom in terms of the creation, production, and distribution of animated cartoons.  They hired Schlesinger to get the job done, and it will forever be to his eternal credit that he was able to do it in such a way as to setup, for a time, the only other major competitor that Disney had in the field of American Animation.  That's where his credit is due.  It's also almost the point at where it all comes to an end.  What Schlesinger basically did is he located a few blocks of unused warehouse space on the Warner lot, gave it a once over and called it good, then had the studio move in a bunch of animator's drawing boards into this dingy, damp, and cramped work space where the lighting was subpar (which is kind of a problem when you need it to see what you're drawing) and the heating/cooling was a mix of on the fritz to next to non-existent.

The place was later designated by all the disgruntled employees who had to work there as Termite Terrace.  It was here, in the most unpromising of settings, that cinematic history would be made.  All that Leon did was really just to scout around for any available animators that Disney hadn't scooped up already, and offer them a job.  The punchline is that it really seems to have been the smartest course of action.  His offers got accepted, and sometimes the people hired on turned out to be more than good.  Guys like Warren Foster, Maurice Noble, and Bob Clampett proved to have more talent and humor in their hands and minds than you'd expect guessed just by looking at them.  Others, like Irving "Friz" Freleng and Charles M. "Chuck" Jones were later brought in after being lured away from Disney.  Perhaps the greatest irony of the entire Termite Terrace operation was that they were making animated legends that would be able to achieve this amazing yet somehow real timeless quality, and yet the studio that was responsible for distributing it would always seeing it as not even anything such as a marketable product, which would at least make sense from a  profit oriented business perspective.

Instead, Leon Schlesinger himself kind of summed up the studio's whole attitude to their animator's ability to turn pen and ink into gold by a constant refrain he had when acting as pretty much the boss of the entire outfit.  Each time he took up his accustomed viewer's spot in the screening room to view the latest finished product by the likes of Chuck Jones (even if it was classics like Duck Amok) was to always begin the preview with the phrase: "Okay, roll the trash".  Let's just say the reputation that the Tunes now enjoy today is a testament to the dedication of the fanbase over the limited thinking of the studio system as a whole.  What I'm starting to realize is just how much that legacy remains reliant on those who've grown able to recognize the artistry of people like Jones, Freleng, and Tex Avery.  It's pretty amazing when you consider how bad the working conditions were at the Terrace.  Staff like Noble, Foster, and others would quit multiple times on the studio, and would then have to be coaxed back to work by making Schlesinger and the Warner management agree to certain terms and promises.  When you consider they were all the victims of a toxic working environment, the achievements they made both in the realms of animation and comedy are more than just damned amazing.

Frank Tashlin didn't just manage to find himself in the thick of all this, he was able to leave his own mark on it.  His most notable efforts for me are 1945's Nasty Quacks, which marks the only time I'm aware of that Daffy was ever given anything close to an origin story.  The other is Hare Remover from 1946.  That one is an entire spin on Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where Elmer Fudd tries to turn Bugs into a monster.  Of all the legends in the Termite Terrace staff, Tashlin is interesting just as much for the career he would go on to have after he left Warner Bros. for good in 1946.  It comes as something of a pleasant surprise to discover that one of the artists who taught us what a sense of humor was like as a child went on to have fairly successful and steady career as a comedy writer for the likes of Bob Hope and the Marx Brothers.  That means he might have had a hand in creating some of Groucho's best lines.  In addition, he was able to find a later decent niche for himself as a director of live action films.  It should come as no surprise that most of these were laugh fests.  Tashlin's most famous work in this regard is The Girl Can't Help It (1956), where he was kind enough to go a long way towards popularizing then emerging phenomenon of Rock 'n Roll to mainstream audiences.

That's a subject for another day, however.  The film were here to look at now marks the last time the former Termite Terrace filmmaker ever worked in the field of animation.  And the interesting part is that it didn't start out as a theatrical short, but as a book.  The Bear that Wasn't first saw life as a children's book that Tashlin seems to have written in his spare time, perhaps as he was finishing up his stint at Warner's and casting about for his next niche.  It seems possible that at one point, one of the avenues he might have thought about exploring was life in the world of book publishing.  If so, then the story of a normal forest bear who wakes up to discover a big city block building sight has been constructed over his cave, and now everyone he meets insists that he's not a bear at all, but just a funny little man in a brown fur coat who needs a shave, sounds like it might have begun life at or around this time.  It's difficult to say for sure when Tashlin began the story, or how long he was at work on it.  What I can say for certain is that in 1967, Frank reconnected with his old fellow animator Chuck Jones, and the two agreed to turn the book into an animated short subject.  The results are what we're here to discuss.

The Story.  

Conclusion: An Unjustly Forgotten Bit of Nostalgia.

This counts as one of the accidental finds of childhood for me.  It's the kind of discovery you can make for yourself on a lazy Sunday afternoon, with nothing much going on, and you've got the Idiot Box turned to Cartoon Network.  You are and aren't paying attention as the images containing a list of names (some famous, others forgotten) pass by like shadows on the wall.  If you have to give any kind of rating to what you're seeing, then most of it ranks as passible, I guess.  Maybe you're at that crucial age where you have to decide whether or not you're too old for this sort of thing, and the choice you make determines the kind of person you'll be from then on.  Either way, at the moment you're somewhere between bored and attentive, and kind of not really able to make up you're mind which state you're in, one way or another.  Nor does it matter all that much.  Then as one TV show and commercial bleeds into another, somehow an odd Chuck Jones films comes on the air before your eyes.  For the first time you find yourself aroused from your comfortable stupor because what's happening on-screen is engaging and funny enough to keep you more or less riveted from start to finish.  It happens just once.

Once it's gone, the cartoon turns into one of those offerings that somehow manages to linger on in your memory.  It's possible to recall bits and pieces of the episode in your mind.  Certain sights and sounds get stuck in your memory for reasons you can't discern, because you were being entertained while still paying just half-attention at the time.  Still, the impact Jones' cartoon left was such that you can remember (just enough) the moment when the title character gets accosted by a construction sight foreman for being out of his work clothes because he thinks he's human being, like him (whatever that's supposed to be).  You can recall the main character being surrounded by others of his own species, only for them to take one look at him and claim they don't recognize him as one of their own.  For some reason Dean Elliot's late 60s jazzy instrumental score has managed to carve a permanent groove in your mind.  In fact, it's part of the reason all of the images just mentioned were able to hang around in your mind for so long until you got curious enough to see if you could track it down.  That's how it was for me, anyway.  I caught it by accident and it's been hanging around in my mind ever since.

Like with every childhood memory that leaves an impact, the biggest challenge is to see if what looked and sounded so grand and epic when you were kid is able to hold up under adult eyes.  The notion of holding on to a treasured childhood memory of a favorite film or TV episode and then coming back to it years later only to discover that what sounded like poetry to young eyes and ears is really just kind of lame has become so much a staple of modern life with the advent of the Internet.  In a world where anyone has the opportunity to catch up with their childhood, the idea of discovering that you've sort of outgrown the media of your youth is pretty much and established piece of modern cliche by this point.  Also, like I said, I was barely paying attention to what was happening on screen the first and last time I ever saw it on TV.  So that means my experience is more fragmented than others.  With all of these caveats in mind, what final results was I able to get out revisiting this half-remembered experience all these years later?  The answer is that I'm the proud recipient of the other half of the cliche coin.  This is where you get a chance to go back and revisit the films of your youth and discover they are able to grow and mature along with you.  That the best films of childhood always have staying power.

The reason for this seems to be because a lot of the media from our younger days where able to find all kinds of ways of either not talking down to kids, or else the filmmakers behind the camera are able to convey whole multitudes of adult themes into these well wrought images and concepts that can appear simple on the surface, and yet are able to surprise you with the way tackle a lot of mature, sometimes even downright dark subject matter.  Whenever that happened, the tone of these films would find the right way to fit the seriousness of the themes being addressed.  That seems to be the biggest takeaway most of us have of the films and shows we liked as children.  They entertained and taught actual life lessons without ever treating us like children.  What's more important, they did it all in ways that have no choice except to be called as freakin' awesome!  To be fair, though, it's pretty clear that Jones and Tashlin aren't trying for anything major, here.  They aren't making a Dark Crystal or Gremlins (although the spirit of Jones' animation, and even the legend himself are a part of the latter film).  Instead, what we've got here is one of those neat and simple character pieces with a great deal of meaning in them.

Tashlin's story of a bear that gets mistaken for a human being is one of those interesting pieces of short fiction that can be read in a number of ways.  On the one hand, it's just a straight forward bit of comedy, the kind of situation that might have been cooked up by James Thurber in one of his anthology collections of humorous observations on life.  The comparison seems apt, given that the title protagonist character of Tashlin's narrative ends up sharing a lot in common with the gallery of overworked and neurotic Everymen that populate Thurber's fiction.  In many ways, the idea of a bear forced to work an assembly line job features all the hallmarks of a classic New Yorker cartoon.  All that's missing is the amusing and witty caption punchline to complete the picture.  The trick with humor is that it always has to be related to a thematic idea in order for the joke to both have and leave an impact.  The Bear that Wasn't seems no different in that regard.  The curious aspect about this story is that you get the sense that there's a deeper meaning to the text than just the amusing notion of a bear getting caught up in the rat race struggle of daily living.  However, there's been some debate on what is it's meaning.

On the one hand, it's possible to see how at least some kind of satire is being made about the potential hollow nature of modern living as it pertains to work and social life.  None of the situations that the bear finds himself in seem all that fulfilling.  He finds himself stuck in a nine to five job, mingling with his fellow workers over coffee and cigarettes (this was back in the 40s to 60s), and yet he never seems to discover any closeness with the people around him.  This sense of alienation extends to the actual humans on the stage.  At no point is the reader or viewer ever given a sense of friendship or even professional camaraderie from the workers surrounding the protagonist.  The implication is that all anybody ever does is get up, go to work, do the job, go through the most perfunctory of social niceties and then leave just as fast as they arrived.  There's a lot of familiar satirical territory to cover with a setup like that.  However, my own major takeaway from this picture is that it's actual meaning lies less with the usual suspects, and more on the personal side of things.  I suppose another way to put it is that this is one of those short stories that almost works as a kind of slovenly autobiography.

It all goes back to what I said about the life of Tashlin himself.  He was the kind of guy who would always find himself drifting through life until he found just the right niche that suited him.  In many ways, the story of a bear who finds himself lost in the rat race sounds very much like the perfect allegorical reflection of the struggle that his author had to deal with in learning where to fit in.  I said earlier that Tashlin's life reads very much like that of a typical wanderer's journey.  In other words, when we talk about artist's like him, it's almost like we're charting the very itinerant and wayward course of an aimless drifter.  Which means we've got a very specific type of personality on our hands.  This "type" used to be common enough back in a time before the world wide web made even the hermits among us seem connected in ways that our parents and their folks couldn't even begin to conceive of.  Before guys like Steve Jobs figured out how to turn a phone into a computer, it was a lot harder for guys like Tashlin to get by.  What I mean is these days anyone who doesn't quite fit into any of the usual round of niches to be had in modern life can always find ways of creating their own spaces for themselves.

It's just something we're capable of doing now, whether the final results take place either on or offline.  In a way, I guess this can be thought of as at least one possible benefit of online connectivity.  To put it another way, if someone like Frank Tashlin were born today, and had access to the Web, odds are even enough that he would sooner or later find ways of carving out a space for himself in our contemporary Content Creator oriented scene.  It's easy to imagine a 21st century version of Tashlin figuring out his way into places like YouTube and Patreon, then drawing (somewhat literally) on his skills as animated illustrator to create his own cartoon subjects for the online market.  In other words, it's easy to imagine a current version of Tashlin debuting some (if perhaps not all) of the Looney Tunes and various other ideas as the sort of uploaded content that could take its place right up there with shows such as Lackadaisy and Hazbin Hotel.  Bear in mind, I'm talking about a what-if scenario, here.  As things turned out, Tashlin was one of those natural born misfits who (to his credit) was able to find a niche of his own.  At the same time, a story like The Bear that Wasn't showcases all the hallmarks of a lucky fella who after all those years could still recall what it felt like to be the marginal odd man out.  

It's in that sense that I'm willing to go with the idea that this animated short film counts as something of a halfways type of autobiography for Tashlin.  It's a portrait of the artist looking back at who he was in comparison to where he's at now.  If the thinking behind this slovenly self-portrait it to be believed, then it's like we're given a view of what being a misfit is like from the inside out.  I suppose the real punchline is that if we're to take Tashlin at his word, then the surprisingly humorous thing about the cartoon is that it shows how comfortable the animator seemed with being a marginal figure.  The title character isn't quite the same type as James Thurber's neurotic, existential clowns.  Nor is he any kind of grand, epic hero tucked away inside an unassuming exterior like Sam Gamgee or Bilbo Baggins.  He's a lot more like a John Candy figure, than anything else.  The protagonist really is just this Joe Average schlub kind of personality wearing a bear costume.  There's no way you can call him a real animal, at the same time he is comic after a fashion, just never in the sense of him being this heightened caricature like Yogi and Boo-boo.  He's just an Everyman archetype who finds himself caught up in an absurd situation due to a hilarious misunderstanding, and the rest of the story is him getting out it.

It's in the way that the bear manages to extricate himself from the story's rat race setting that I think says a lot about it being Tashlin's half-conscious portrait of himself.  The bear comes within inches of having an identity crisis of a sort, however, the onset of winter begins to set him on all the familiar routines that every Ursine has to utilize in order to survive in a harsh climate.  It's this getting back into the groove of his own nature that allows the bear to realize that someone like him truly doesn't have anything to do with the whole rat race aspect of life, and pretty soon he's back to just doing the normal things he always does.  In essence, what've got here is an animated fairy tale about personal integrity of a sort.  The trick with this kind of setup is that it's got this kind of all-purpose moral that can have multiple levels of applicability depending on how one chooses to either view or frame it.  What makes me want to go with the notion of the cartoon being this allegorized confession on the part of the artist is because of the way all the major plot beats help to spell out Tashlin's own viewpoint about life and his place in it.  The film's point of view centers around a character who seems to find life in and of itself as okay.

It's when you try and take something simple and complicate it that the confusion begins to set in for him.  Now for most of us, the idea of needing at least some sort of employment just to help keep oneself afloat makes kind of sense enough.  If we look at the Bear as a stand-in for Tashlin's viewpoint, however, then it's clear the daily grind is just something that he seems incapable of getting a handle on, or wanting to be a part of.  He's quite content to take it easy, live, and let live.  It's with this realization of the main character's over-arching motivation that I think we've gotten about as close as we'll ever get anymore to Tashlin's own personal outlook on things in general.  His seems to have been a very uncomplex and cut-and-dried approach to living.  It's almost like we're dealing with this unlettered Emersonian or Thoreau like mindset.  Give him a niche that's simple and understandable, and it's possible that you've taught someone like Tashlin how to fish for life, to borrow from an old aphorism.  There is a sense, then, in which The Bear that Wasn't functions as a kind of countercultural statement of sorts.  There's a clear rejection of the daily grind in favor of a simpler way of living.  And that's sort of all he wrote.  Tashlin never gives us a clue as to what such an ideal might be.  All he's willing to tell us is that he's found it for himself.  Some might want to criticize this as the film's one major flaw.

I'm not so sure that an approach like that is warranted here, however.  Because like I said, it's a type of allegorical biography.  Tashlin isn't interested in giving us any grand insights into the nature of reality, or anything like that.  He's just telling us in an indirect fashion how he was able to find a place for himself in the order of things.  If there happens to be any greater theme going on in this short film, then I guess it might go something along the lines of "To thine own self be true".  In terms of how good of a payoff a story like that is able to give its audience, all I can do is speak for myself.  With that in mind, it's one of those old cartoons that are able to surprise you with how such a simple, even absurd premise, can leave you impressed with its execution and story.  If I had to compare it to anything, then it would have to be to another well-known Chuck Jones feature.  This one, however, has gone on to eclipse the narrative of Tashlin's imaginary Bear as a household name.  I'm talking, of course, about the Grinch.

The story of how a Grinchy curmudgeon tries to ruin the Holiday for others, only to learn a valuable life lesson in the process, is yet another example of how simple narratives can go on to leave a big impact and legacy on the pop culture memory.  That's an entire story with all the simplicity of a fairy tale, and perhaps that's one of the big reasons its stuck around so long.  Tashlin's hapless Ursine seems to be cut from very similar cloth as the ones that make up the Grinch's narrative.  The real difference between the two is that one of them went on to become a holiday staple, while the other has all but been buried under the sands of time.  Part of that might be down to the half-formed notions of personal integrity that Tashlin seems to be tracking down in his script.  It's the kind of material you expect to find in a Woody Allen film, rather than just a straightforward fairy tale for Christmas.  At the same time, this makes the mistake of saying that Jones' Dr. Seuss project is light on thought, which is far from the truth.  It's just that his collaboration with Ted Geisel has a greater mainstream appeal than the story of a nameless bear caught up in the plot of a Coen Bros. movie.  That's still not that same as labeling Tashlin's film as a failure.

On the whole, I had a lot of fun with it.  The thing about Chuck Jones is that he's one of those rare artists who possess the remarkable ability to make a simple premise go a long way in terms of its entertainment value.  A good example of what I mean is a simple Tunes short like Duck Amok.  That entire cartoon is just one character all by himself in a blank space while the setting and appearances shift around him in a constant absurdist loop until the main character soon realizes he's at the mercy the Art of Animation in and of itself.  It's the perfect combination of abstract thought mixed with accessible Golden Age cartoon sight gags and physics.  Another way of putting it is to say that Jones was always the kind of director who could spot epic, or at very least, the grand in the normal and the mundane.  A strength of both his animation and stories rests in his ability to find that greater fairy tale quality in the simplest of settings (such as uncovering a singing frog in the middle of an ordinary construction sight) and making the mundane larger than life.  Those same characteristics are on display in his adaptation of Tashlin's short story.  It's easy to sympathize with the plight of the main character, even as we find his predicament amusing.  It speaks to the need of everyone to find a niche of their own.

In addition, in terms of art style, I'll simply note that the more I go on, the more there is to appreciate in Jones' simple and calming combination of the modernist abstract mixed with this welcoming homespun quality that's kind of difficult to place, yet you always recognize it when you see it.  Whenever it crops up in these older animated features I tend to find them something like a welcome relief from the more polished and assembly line format of like the Pixar house method that's come to dominate animation over the last few years.  It helps to remind me that there is no single perfect art style, and that other methods of representation deserve to be heard from every now and again.  Put all those ingredients together and you've got the makings of a perfectly fine and enjoyable Aesopian fable for the modern age.  The Bear that Wasn't is an overlooked and quiet gem that deserves to be rediscovered today.