Angel Puss
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| Angel Puss | |
|---|---|
 Title card | |
| Directed by | Charles M. Jones |
| Story by | Lou Lilly |
| Produced by | Leon Schlesinger |
| Music by | Carl W. Stalling |
| Animation by | Ken Harris |
| Color process | Technicolor |
| Distributed by | Warner Bros. Pictures The Vitaphone Corporation |
Release date |
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Running time | 7 minutes |
Angel Puss is a 1944 Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoon directed by Chuck Jones.[1] The short was released on June 3, 1944.[2]
The protagonist is a "Li'l Sambo" type blackface character who exhibits common racial stereotypes in speech, intelligence and fear of the supernatural. The African-American weekly newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier objected strongly to the cartoon, especially because it was run in Los Angeles alongside the March of Time short Americans All, on the theme of fighting prejudice and stereotypes. The film press did not acknowledge these concerns.[3]
The short is one of the "Censored Eleven", a group of Warner Bros. animated shorts that are withheld from circulation due to their dated racist stereotyping and portrayals. This is also the only Looney Tunes short in the Censored Eleven, as the other shorts are Merrie Melodies, and the only short of the Censored Eleven Jones directed.
A young African-American boy (drawn in blackface style) carries a sack to a river and laments that he has agreed to drown a cat. While the boy stares at the water, the cat slips out of the sack and fills it with bricks. When the boy says that he can't go through with the task, the hidden cat, pretending to be the boy's conscience, says, "Go ahead, Sambo, go ahead, boy," and reminds him that he has been paid "four bits" to do the job. Sambo reluctantly drops the bag in the river rather than return the money.
The cat then disguises itself as its own ghost, painting itself white and donning wings and a halo, and proceeds to "haunt" Sambo by repeatedly sneaking up on him and whispering "boo". Sambo runs away, but the cat rattles a pair of dice, causing Sambo to fall into a trance and unconsciously walk back to the cat (part of a running gag in Warner Bros. cartoons that stereotypes African-Americans as being addicted to gambling).
The hauntings continue until Sambo and the cat fall in a pond, washing off the cat's paint. When Sambo realizes that he has been tricked, he kills the cat with a shotgun blast. Immediately afterward, a line of nine ghost cats (representing a cat's nine lives) marches toward Sambo, saying, "And this time, brother, us ain't kiddin'."