A funny animal is an anthropomorphic animal character who lives like a human. Funny animals typically are bipedal, wear clothes, live in houses, drive vehicles, and have jobs, which distinguish them from other animal characters who may nonetheless display anthropomorphic characteristics such as speaking or showing facial expressions. Additionally, some characters such as Bugs Bunny are inconsistently characterized as funny animals, while others such as Brian Griffin derive humor from the inconsistency. Funny animal (also talking animal) is also the genre of comics and animated cartoons which primarily feature funny animals.
While many funny animal stories are light-hearted and humorous, the genre is not exclusively comedic. Dark or serious stories featuring characters of this sort can also be grouped under the "funny animals" category, sometimes referred to as anthropomorphic characters to avoid confusion over the range of genres. These stories may intersect with any other genre or group of genres, including historical fiction, science fiction, superhero, western, slapstick comedy, children's/family entertainment, and satire.
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History
Print media
Early examples of funny animal characters in literature came in the 1865 book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll with characters such as the White Rabbit and the March Hare.
An early example of a book which made exclusive use of funny animals was the 1908 children's book The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. This story featured the character Mr. Toad who is human in almost every sense. Other characters in the book, such as a mole, water rat, and otter, are also very human with the exception of preferring their species' native habitats. The mole, for example, lives underground, but in a finished home.
The 1945 novel Animal Farm by George Orwell notably features several talking animal characters who transition to bipedal, clothes-wearing funny animals by the end of the story.
In the 1940s, Fawcett Comics published a comic book entitled Funny Animals, featuring such characters as Hoppy the Marvel Bunny, an anthropomorphic rabbit version of Captain Marvel. Beginning in the 1980s, there was a subgenre of original funny animal comic books with subject matter that were created largely for mature readers. These creations included the political science fiction allegory in Albedo Anthropomorphics, the sexually explicit serial drama of Omaha the Cat Dancer, the noir style of Blacksad and the Pulitzer Prize winning graphic Holocaust narrative, Maus.
Comic strips have long been an outlet for funny animal characters. U.S. Acres is a popular comic strip (that originally ran in newspapers from 1986 to 1989 and currently in reruns as webcomic) featuring a group of a group of barnyard funny animals, with the main character being Orson, a pig; another Jim Davis strip, the long-running Garfield, also centers on funny animals, most commonly the title character and dog Odie. Krazy Kat was a popular early comic strip featuring the titular cat and its companionship with a mouse named Ignatz. Other comic strips, while not directly starring funny animals, feature such characters prominently in the supporting or ensemble cast; one such example is Snoopy, a dog that serves as a major character in the comic strip Peanuts.
Funny animals in comic strips often follow a particular convention in conveying thoughts: instead of verbalizing as humans would with speech balloons, funny animals instead use thought balloons to convey messages. This tactic allows for the relationship between human and animal to be ambiguous, as it may not be clear if the human can understand what the animal is thinking. The aforementioned Snoopy and Garfield are famous for this type of thought-speech. When the Peanuts specials were adapted for television, producers opted to make Snoopy mute, just as a normal dog would be, and act out his thoughts in pantomime. The ambiguous relation between Garfield and his owner Jon Arbuckle inspired a number of derivative works, among them being Garfield Minus Garfield, a collection of strips with the title character edited out and Arbuckle effectively speaking to himself.
Animated cartoons
The funny animal genre evolved in the 1920s and 1930s, at a time when blackface became less socially acceptable. Early black-and-white funny animals, including Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Mickey Mouse, Foxy the Fox, Felix the Cat and Flip the Frog, maintained certain aspects of the blackface design, including (especially with the advent of sound film) heavy emphasis on song and dance routines. The increased use of Technicolor and other color film processes in the 1930s allowed for greater diversity in the ability to design new "funny animals", leading to a much wider array of funny animal shorts and the near-total demise (except for Mickey Mouse and a few other Disney characters of the era) of the blackface characters. Song and dance fell out of favor and were largely replaced by comedy and satire. The Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts by Warner Bros. Animation, for instance, introduced dozens of funny animals, many of whom have reached iconic status in American culture. Other notable funny animals from the color film era included Universal's Woody Woodpecker, Wally Walrus, Chilly Willy and Andy Panda; MGM's Tom and Jerry, Screwy Squirrel, Barney Bear and Droopy; and Terrytoons' Heckle and Jeckle, Gandy Goose, Dinky Duck and Mighty Mouse.
Television changed the dynamic of animation, in that although budgets were much smaller and schedules much tighter, this prompted a shift from the physical comedy that predominated film shorts to more dialogue-oriented jokes (including celebrity impressions and one-liner jokes). Hanna-Barbera Productions focused almost exclusively on these kinds of funny animal TV series, creating an extensive line of funny animal television series such as Huckleberry Hound, Pixie and Dixie, Hokey Wolf, Quick Draw McGraw and Baba Looey, Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy, Snooper and Blabber, Loopy De Loop, Yogi Bear, Snagglepuss, Yakky Doodle, Top Cat, Touché Turtle, Lippy the Lion & Hardy Har Har, Magilla Gorilla, Punkin' Puss & Mushmouse, Ricochet Rabbit & Droop-a-Long, Peter Potamus & So-So Monkey, Breezly and Sneezly, Yippee, Yappee and Yahooey, Atom Ant, The Hillbilly Bears, Secret Squirrel, Squiddly Diddly, Cattanooga Cats, Motormouse and Autocat and It's the Wolf!. Jay Ward Productions also produced Rocky and His Friends (also known as The Bullwinkle Show or The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show), a series starring a "plucky" flying squirrel named Rocky and his incompetent moose sidekick and best friend, Bullwinkle J. Moose, as they fought against Eastern European (human) espionage. The series was a representative of the genre (albeit with much stronger Cold War overtones than the shows of Hanna-Barbera exhibited); Ward was also responsible for the lighter funny animal series Super Chicken and Hoppity Hooper, and his contemporary Total Television (which used the same Mexican animation studio) produced a complementary string of animal cartoons of its own, famously Underdog.
By the 1970s, most funny animals had lost their lead status and had been relegated to members of an ensemble cast of mostly humans or supporting characters; a classic example of this was the Scooby-Doo franchise, which featured Scooby-Doo leading an ensemble of four teenaged humans solving mysteries, a trope that would be imitated through the 1970s with numerous other series. During this period there were standout creations like Ralph Bakshi's iconoclastic feature animated film, Fritz the Cat. Funny animals and animal-like characters made a brief comeback in the late 1980s and into the 1990s (most notably through various Warner Bros. and Disney television creations, and through the decidedly cruder work of Ralph Bakshi and John Kricfalusi). The subsequent years also had numerous successful animated feature film franchises that featured funny animal characters like DreamWorks Animation's Kung Fu Panda series, Walt Disney Animation Studios' Zootopia and Illumination Entertainment's Sing. Animators have created increasingly more unusual examples of funny animals in this era, including Perry the Platypus (from Disney's Phineas and Ferb), Dudley Puppy (from Nickelodeon's T.U.F.F. Puppy), Mordecai and Rigby (from Cartoon Network's Regular Show), Brandy & Mr. Whiskers (from the Disney's TV series of the same name), SpongeBob SquarePants (from the Nickelodeon's TV series of the same name) and The Watterson Family (from Cartoon Network's The Amazing World of Gumball). Netflix's BoJack Horseman features adult themes played out by a mixture of animals and humans who rarely mention their differences, and when the differences are mentioned it is sometimes taken as a racial slight.
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