"In animated cartoons, we do generally prefer animals to humans. First, if your story calls for human beings, use live action. It is cheaper, quicker and more believable. If, as a director, I could train a live coyote and a live road runner to act, I would use them. I am an animator and an animation director; therefore, I look for characters that cannot be done in live action. That is what animation is all about; it is an extension beyond the ability of live-action motion pictures. Second, as said, it is easier to humanize animals than it is to humanize human beings; we are surrounded by human beings; we are subconsciously and consciously critical of other human beings according to how they deviate from our own behavior or from standards of behavior we approve of. Therefore, to many of us, everyone who looks like a cokehead is a cokehead. Everyone who looks like a bum is a bum. But, if so, what about the talent of Theodore Dreiser, who looked like an unmade bed? If all wimpy-looking people are wimps, what about Woody Allen?
"It is in order to avoid these stereotypes that animators, as well as Aesop, Kipling, La Fontaine, E. B. White, Beatrix Potter, Felix Salten, Walt Kelly, and countless other writers, turned to animals. People look at rabbits or ducks or bears as a class rather than individuals, though it is true we stereotype these classes. We classify all snakes as repulsive or dangerous, when fewer than one snake in a million can or will harm us. We are revolted by spiders, when most spiders are beneficial to mankind and only one spider in a million is harmful to man, and then, like the snake, only if provoked.
"Working against these stereotypes, animation directors and writers have attempted to explode human prejudices: E. B. White's heroine in Charlotte's Web was a spider; one of Rudyard Kipling's heroes in The Jungle Book was a thirty-foot python who loved a small boy, not as an hors d'oeuvre, but as a friend. Bugs Bunny grew into a comic hero with the kind of human characteristics we admire and laugh with, because no one would expect a rabbit to have any personality at all. After all, rabbits are rabbits, aren't they? Just as with Daffy Duck, a wimpy duck with the ego of a Stallone--come now, ducks quack, that's about it with ducks. how about Pepe Le Pew? A skunk with an overwhelming confidence in his own desirability?"
