Cartoons

From Bugs to Meeseeks: The Evolution of Funny Looking Cartoon Characters

Learn why animators discovered that exaggeration and grotesque details make characters funnier than cuteness, from Bugs Bunny to Mr. Meeseeks.

By Written Facts StaffJune 5, 2023Updated October 8, 20267 min read

You've probably laughed at a cartoon face before you knew what the joke was: a jaw hitting the floor, eyes shooting out of a head, a blue creature screaming "Look at me!" These characters don't look funny by accident. Over about 75 years, animators learned that "cute" kills a laugh and that distortion gets one. Each generation pushed the exaggeration further. Bugs Bunny was redesigned because he looked too sweet. Tex Avery made eyes leave the body. Ren & Stimpy made the close-up gross. SpongeBob and Rick and Morty took that freedom and added something new: odd designs that also carry feeling.

Bugs Bunny started out too cute

Bugs didn't arrive fully formed. An early version of the rabbit appeared in Porky's Hare Hunt (1938), co-directed by Ben "Bugs" Hardaway and Cal Dalton. That prototype was white, with "an oval head and a shapeless body," and played a loud rural buffoon.

Character designer Charles Thorson then drew a more polished model sheet: a pear-shaped body, a flat face, big expressive eyes and a long neck. It was a comic version of the fuzzy storybook bunny, and it showed Disney's influence. Thorson also gave the character his name by accident. He labeled the sheet "Bugs's Bunny," meaning Hardaway's rabbit, and the studio's promotional material shortened it to "Bugs" Bunny.

When Tex Avery prepared A Wild Hare (1940), he thought the rabbit had potential but was "too cute." He asked animator Bob Givens to redesign it, and Givens made the character longer and more upright. A couple of years later, Robert McKimson gave Bugs more slanted eyes, longer teeth and a bigger mouth, and that version became the standard across Warner Bros.' animation units.

The look worked because it fit the attitude. Avery wrote "What's up, Doc?" for A Wild Hare. The carrot-chomping came from Clark Gable's eating scene in It Happened One Night (1934). A cocky rabbit needed a face that could smirk, and the cute version couldn't.

Tex Avery made the body the punchline

Once Bugs had proved that a lanky, sly design could get laughs, Avery kept pushing. His trademarks were exaggerated emotions (eyes popping out of heads), fast chases, absurd gags and painful slapstick.

The best-known example is Red Hot Riding Hood (1943). It moves the fairy tale to a Hollywood nightclub, where a tuxedoed wolf watches Red sing. His tongue rolls out, his eyes pop from his head, and he hits himself with a hammer. Avery used extreme squash and stretch, smears and double takes so wild that the wolf's pupils leave his body entirely. At that point the character's anatomy had become the joke. That idea shaped the rest of the cartoon world.

Ren & Stimpy turned exaggeration into grotesque

Fifty years later, a creator raised on Avery took the idea somewhere new. The Ren & Stimpy Show was created by Canadian animator John Kricfalusi and premiered on Nickelodeon on August 11, 1991. Kricfalusi took his chaotic energy from the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons of the 1930s and '40s, and from his heroes Avery and Bob Clampett.

His signature addition was the "gross-up." The cartoon would cut away from the simple, bouncy drawings to a detailed painted close-up of something repulsive, like a character's twitching, bloodshot face or a hairball. Avery's characters looked funny while they moved. Kricfalusi made them look funny by holding still long enough for you to see every disgusting detail.

The show's influence was wide. Its legacy runs through 2 Stupid Dogs, Pinky and the Brain, Rocko's Modern Life and Beavis and Butt-Head, which MTV greenlit partly because Nickelodeon had succeeded with Ren & Stimpy.

SpongeBob proved a funny shape could be sweet

One show that inherited that freedom was SpongeBob SquarePants. Its grotesque close-ups, off-the-wall jokes, bright colors and storyboard-driven production all echo Ren & Stimpy. Its creator, Stephen Hillenburg, had a background no one else in animation had. He worked as a marine biologist from 1984 to 1987 and taught marine science at the Ocean Institute in Dana Point, California. While there, he created "Bob the Sponge" for an unpublished educational comic called The Intertidal Zone.

Hillenburg first drew his hero as a natural sea sponge. Then he sketched a square kitchen sponge, which "looked so funny" that he knew he had found his star. He also felt it suited the character's personality better. The square shape became so central that it gave the character his surname. Hillenburg first called him "SpongeBoy," but the name was already trademarked, so he became SpongeBob. The pilot, "Help Wanted," premiered in 1999.

The big difference from Ren is the heart underneath. Hillenburg modeled SpongeBob on innocent, childlike comic performers: Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Jerry Lewis and Pee-wee Herman. He wanted the character to be "goofy and optimistic." Tom Kenny, whose voice Hillenburg had already used for a minor character on Rocko's Modern Life, built SpongeBob's high-pitched laugh to be one of a kind, drawing on the tradition of Popeye and Woody Woodpecker. The design could be strange because the character was kind.

Mr. Meeseeks made the funny look sad

Mr. Meeseeks takes this family tree to an odd new place. Created by Justin Roiland, Dan Harmon and Ryan Ridley, the character first appeared in the Rick and Morty episode "Meeseeks and Destroy" (2014). Roiland designed him and voiced him from 2014 to 2020. He drew on Scud, the robot hero of Rob Schrab's comic Scud: The Disposable Assassin. Roiland and Harmon have said Ren & Stimpy changed their sense of what animation could do in style and tone, so the line from Avery runs straight to him.

The design is pure cartoon: powder-blue skin, long rubbery limbs, a bulbous head and beady black eyes. The concept adds the twist. Each Meeseeks is summoned from a Meeseeks Box to do one task, usually lives only a few hours, and vanishes when the job is done. If he can't finish, he falls apart mentally and physically and becomes more unstable and violent. For a Meeseeks, existence is pain, and disappearing is a mercy. His cheerful "I'm Mr. Meeseeks, look at me!" works as a catchphrase and as a cry for help. The character went on to sell board games, figurines, jack-in-the-boxes and branded snacks.

What the evolution adds up to

This part is my interpretation, not a recorded fact. Each step in this line kept what came before and added one thing:

Bugs Bunny showed that a cartoon character gets funnier when you strip out the cuteness and draw the attitude.
Tex Avery turned the body itself into a gag that could stretch, pop and break.
Ren & Stimpy made ugliness and gross detail part of the joke.
SpongeBob paired an absurd shape with real innocence.
Mr. Meeseeks used a goofy design to deliver an uncomfortable idea about existence.

That reaction GIF you sent works because 75 years of animators kept asking how far a face could go before it stopped being funny, and they found the answer kept getting further away.

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