Toll Bridge Troubles

The Fox and the Crow persistently fascinate me. Despite their relatively lean filmography (a 'mere' 24 shorts) by the standards of 'golden age' western animation, the continual state of flux plaguing Screen Gems' creative team in the 40s (from the residue of the Mintz-era crew to Frank Tashlin to John Hubley's earliest burgeoning attempts at his trademark and eventual industry-defining UPA stylization (under the, uh, 'supervision' of a recently-displaced Dave Fleischer) and finally the stream-of-consciousness incompetence of the studio's dying days) renders these shorts an inconsistent-yet-intriguing vivisection into a number of the creative stylings populating the 40s animation field, if challenging to coalesce into a singular evaluation of the characters (in their many incarnations) overall. The eclectic quality of the shorts themselves, both between and, bizarrely, within, installments, generally doesn't aid this either.

In this capacity, "Toll Bridge Troubles", essentially produced on the cusp between the Tashlin and Fleischer regimes, is a strange beast in its intermingling of a number of the Tashlin regime's strengths with structural and conceptual faults so glaring as to indicate a rising malaise with the characters a mere three appearances in. The dynamic between the titular duo, on a fundamental level, is notably uneven - while the crow is essentially meant to be a Brooklynese con man/wise guy a la the (earlier) Bugs Bunny mold, the central conflict both lacks the stakes and balance defining the Bugs/Elmer Fudd dynamic (Elmer Fudd is equally as gullible and impulsive as the Fox in numerous regards despite his wielding of a hunting rifle, which both provides a plausible catalyst inciting Bugs to act against him while raising the stakes of Bugs' trickery to both gain him the audience's sympathy and establish a successful kind of catharsis within his 'routine' with Elmer by enabling the audience to project their own underlying recognition of desire a seemingly-inevitable perilous fate, or perhaps merely a cosmetically-imposing force of authority, onto Bugs' antics while simultaneously caricaturing the 'face of the authority' via Elmer to add additional comic levity). Comparatively, the Crow here merely sets upon the Fox as a 'sucker' with no motive and proceeds to heckle him within a relatively low-stake situation (the crossing of a bridge, with the Fox's motive for wanting to do so unknown) within which the Fox poses essentially no threat or form of opposition thanks largely to his gullibility, which is emphasized here to the point of defanging their dynamic further: it's possible that the Fox repeatedly falling for the Crow's feigned 'assistance' could constitute an attempt at caricaturing the increasingly-ludicrous human response to achieving a minor-yet-seemingly-unobtainable goal (which the earlier "Fox and Grapes" depicts far more successfully - the short is basically the Fox against his own projections, with the Crow, given his lack of presence in the final scene, merely a symbolic depiction of fate, or an extension of the Fox's self-defeating determination, more than 50% of a conventional comedy duo), yet the short itself seems indecisive on this, given that the Fox's lack of awareness is hyperbolized so frequently as to suggest stupidity more than increasing blindness to the disproportionality of his actions (seriously, not noticing your alleged 'ally' snag the rubber lifesaver surrounding your scooter with an anchor and remaining completely blind to said lifesaver audibly and visibly stretching to a breaking point?). Resultantly, the Fox here comes off more as lacking agency (and thereby a hapless victim of the Crow) than as an extension of human fault (ie a hapless victim of himself) as with "Grapes", which leaves the comedic routine governing the short imbalanced and lacking in catharsis or focus - is the audience meant to root for the Crow, who has no stakes or motives in the situation, or the Fox, who is mostly a clueless victim? If neither, what kind of point or dynamic is the narrative or gags attempting to convey? Alas, the short doesn't seem to consistently offer up an answer.

That is, however, not to say that the short lacks redeeming facets, which it actually possesses in droves. Coming off the heels of Tashlin's all-too-brief regime, the cinematography and direction are far more expressive than Screen Gem's later output (the lifesaver and ramp gags in particular are both impressively and expressively-framed, which accentuates their baseline absurdity relatively effectively and provides the short with a kind of appeal, if not as satisfying as its WB and MGM contemporaries), the animation (courtesy of Louie Schmitt, formerly of Disney and later of Tex Avery at MGM) is wonderfully fluid (complemented by Schmitt's appealingly rounded-yet-sleek designs of the duo) and background work is far above-average for the studio and Frank Graham's vocals largely support his case as the most underrated voice actor of the 40s Hollywood scene (I love the almost self-referentially absurd campness of his performance as the Fox, particularly his increasingly flustered opposition to the Crow's obstructions; the latter's drawn-out sarcastic "nooo...." in response to the Fox's subsequent inane declaration is similarly hilarious), which lend the short a kind of enjoyability. It's just a shame that the appeal doesn't subjectively extend to the underlying narrative and dynamics.