A reposting from former Ohio animation studio Character Builders's detailed Space Jam feature on their website from 1997. Link at https://web.archive.org/web/19970128200448/http://www.cbuilders.com/cat.htm.
Of all the Warner Brothers characters, Sylvester has always held a special place in my heart. His creator, the great Friz Freleng, gave him a wonderful unity of design and personality. Unlike his partner/adversary Tweety, who looks guileless and helpless but is actually quite wily and capable of defending himself with extreme prejudice, Sylvester's clownish exterior fails to mask his equally clownish interior. With Sylvester, what you see is literally what you get. Each thought that crosses his mind and each emotion that enters his heart is openly displayed in his face and form. He is a wholly externalized pussycat who should avoid poker games at all costs. Never the brightest of characters, Sylvester is at least a couple of rungs up from the bottom of the intelligence ladder (said bottom rung being occupied by Elmer Fudd).
Perhaps Sylvester's most endearing quality is that his sense of self is defined by the fact that he is a cat and that his highest ambition is to be a successful cat. To be a successful cat, one must succeed at the following activities; being lazy, scavenging through trash cans, catching and eating mice, catching and eating tweety birds, yowling on back alley fences in the dead of night and last, but not least, passing on the techniques of successful cathood to one's offspring. Needless to say, Sylvester's sense of self takes just as many lumps as his thick head does. And yet in spite of physical pain and wounded pride he always comes back for more. In spite of Granny and her wicked aim with a broom he comes back for more. In spite of falling pianos, crazed bulldogs and stray high voltage wires he comes back for more. Sylvester can be undone but he can never be truly defeated. He will always make one more attempt to eat the tweety bird or one more try to catch the giant mouse, because after all, he is a pussycat.
Even in the early drafts of the Space Jam screenplay (of which there were more than a few) there was a potentially juicy character moment for Sylvester in a sequence (officially logged as Scene 34; "Bugs Challenges Aliens") that we commonly referred to as "The War Room." The setup is as follows; Bugs Bunny has managed to con the five tiny aliens who have captured him into agreeing to a competition, the outcome of which will determine the fate of all of the Looney Tunes characters. Bugs then convenes a council of war (which was, at one point in storyboarding, set in the "Dr. Strangelove" War Room, hence the common title) with Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd and Sylvester. With a brain trust like that it's obvious that Bugs will have to exercise some serious leadership skills to coax them all along to the same conclusion. Porky proposes a lame idea. Elmer tops Porky's lame idea with a genuinely stupid idea, at which point Sylvester, exasperated with the cluelessness of the others, pitches his idea; a complete nonsequitur involving getting a ladder, waiting until the old lady is out of the room and then grabbing the little bird.
Several different versions of the War Room sequence were prepared during the storyboarding process. One intriguing version had Sylvester acting out his whole speech on camera in one continuous shot. The shot would have been about 20 feet (13 seconds) long. It's a good challenge to try to hold an audience for that long in a single shot of one character talking with no props to use or other characters on camera to interact with. This version was ultimately discarded, but from time to time I find myself wondering how I would have done with it.
In the final version of the storyboard, Sylvester's speech is distributed over five shots. Sylvester enters, back to the camera, at the tail of a wide shot of Porky, Bugs, Daffy and Elmer standing around a table. Just after he starts his rant we cut to a medium closeup of Sylvester. As Sylvester begins to detail his "plan," -we cut in to his fantasy for two shots, in which he finally catches Tweety. Sylvester works himself into a frenzy, panting wildly as he prepares to devour his prey. We dissolve out of the fantasy to reveal Sylvester grasping, not Tweety, but his own thumb. Bugs enters the frame and tries to coax Sylvester back to reality.
With the storyboard approved and the voice tracks recorded, I could begin to shape Sylvester's performance in animation. Veteran voice artist Bill Farmer (the voice of Disney's Goofy) performs several roles in "Space Jam," including Sylvester and Yosemite Sam. His performance of Sylvester's War Room rant gave me everything I could possibly want to work with. I particularly liked how he built Sylvester's excitement, culminating in a particularly demented kind of heavy breathing. After repeated listenings to the voice track, I could begin to draw.
I usually start a scene by trying to nail down a handful of strong character poses for what I feel are the scene's key moments. Typically, I'll spend a couple of days doing a lot of drawings that end up in the trash before I find the four or five poses that have potential. These poses go through a number of drafts before I'm ready to send them on to supervisor Jim Kammerud (and anyone else at Character Builders that cares to comment on them). The objective is to capture the essence of the character's performance in a few clear drawings that can serve as the foundation for the many drawings that will follow. We ask ourselves whether or not the drawings capture what the character is thinking and feeling at that moment in time. Just as important in the world of Looney Tunes is whether or not the drawings bring out the humor inherent in the character. With the Looney Tunes characters there is the potential for some level of comedy in every shot.
The main thing I wanted to get out of the sequence was a fresh, funny way to showcase Sylvester's very familiar persona. The idea of Sylvester addressing a group of characters and trying to assume a leadership role echoes Bob Clampett's "Kitty Kornered" (1946). While I avoided directly referencing existing animation, "Kitty Kornered" along with Friz Freleng's "Back Alley Oproar" -(1948) greatly influenced my work on Sylvester. In both cartoons, Sylvester strikes poses that suggest the theatricality of a Victorian ham actor or orator. I felt that at this moment in "Space Jam," just as he is in these earlier cartoons, Sylvester should be very much enjoying his own performance. He is absolutely thrilled and excited to be proposing a bold and decisive plan of action, in spite of the fact that it is the very same plan that he's been failing at for the past fifty years and has no application to the problem at hand. It's his plan, the plan of a true pussycat, and he's proud of it!
Sylvester's excitement turns to frenzy as, in his fantasy, he is about to finally succeed in eating Tweety. The heavy breathing on the voice track and the interaction between Sylvester and Bugs reminded me of an old Marx Brothers routine from "Animal Crackers" in which Harpo goes berserk and starts sucker-punching Margaret Dumont. Chico pulls Harpo off of the hapless victim and tries to snap him back to reality. Harpo sort of comes back to reality in a fast transition from frenzied heavy breathing to nodding his head at Chico and grinning like an idiot. I adapted this bit of business for Sylvester, although Bugs shows a bit more concern for his addled friend than Chico shows toward Harpo. Ever-perceptive, Bugs knows that fifty years of thwarted tweety-bird cravings can really take a toll on a self-respecting pussycat.
At this point, I would usually begin posing out the scene in thumbnail sketches, working on the main poses and making notes on secondary movement that occur within the pose. By writing the dialog beneath the thumbnails I can relate the two to one another quickly and try some different options. However, on this scene, because the character's position and perspective were constantly changing I decided to first solve some of the drawing problems. The computer-generated photo-roto had a floor grid that showed the perspective and a large cylinder that represented Nada's position and size. I determined Nada's height as compared to the cylinder and his foot position relative to the perspective grid. Using this drawing as a guide I "animated" (on twos and threes) Nada standing still with his feet planted as his position changed and the camera rotated around him. This was basically a technical exercise but it would make my job much easier later on when I would animate Nada's dribbling action.
Bruce Smith (who, along with Tony Cervone, directed the animation) was really interested in capturing the specific athleticism of basketball. Since my hoops game is mediocre at best, I went back to footage of NBA players who actually have skills. I looked at video of Muggsy Bogues (Nada's live-action counterpart), Tim Hardaway, Kenny Anderson, Isaiah Thomas, and even Bob Cousy, analyzing the action, making sketches, and trying to repeat the action myself. I then settled on some old footage in which one of the Harlem Globetrotters dribbles through his legs from the front and then from the back in rapid succession. In order for Nada to do this, he would have to rotate his upper body counter to the camera's rotation, which would make for a more interesting scene. 
Using the footage as a reference for timing, I began animating the upper body and the arms as they relate to the ball. Also I began putting in the main dialog accents all the while checking this against the ever-changing perspective and shooting pencil tests. Because everything was moving all the time in this scene, there wasn't much I could chart for my assistants. Virtually every drawing was a key I had to do myself.
Initially I had intended to animate multiple hands and arms, but when I started the scene I chickened out because it seemed too hard. But now, given what I had already done, it didn't seem like that much more work. I reworked the scene adding extra hands and multiple basketballs, distorting the perspective and pushing the squash and stretch. This improved the scene on various levels but mostly improved the sense of caricature. Instead of showing a solidly drafted realistically animated basketball playing alien that could have been a real actor, it showed an enthusiastic NADA moving athletically and naturalistically, but much farther and faster than any real person ever could.
No, not just fear...abject terror.
Of course, I face every new scene with this same curious mixture of apprehension and excitement. Usually, the fear is only momentary, and then the enthusiasm kicks in. (Although I have been known to waste several days procrastinating in order to avoid starting a particularly daunting scene. Funny, the crap you can find to distract you!) But this scene was a little different. It was the first time we would see Bugs, so it was also the first opportunity the audience would have to decide whether or not we were going to give them the same old irascible rabbit that they know and love or some cheap hollow impostor. Would he look the same as the Bugs they cherish, move the same, act the same? Would he make them laugh? The reaction to our version of Bugs in this first scene could color the audience's perception of him for the rest of the film. Especially if it was bad.
As it happens, I already had an intimate knowledge of the scene in question. I had storyboarded it myself months earlier as part of the sequence where the little aliens first meet Bugs. The capsule description is this: After the alien spaceship arrives in the skies over "Toonland", we pan down to the forest floor where Bugs comes racing over a distant hill and towards the camera. As he nears, the camera "picks him up" and tracks with him as he flees a pursuing, but still offscreen, Elmer Fudd. But just as it seems Bugs is going to leave Elmer (and us) in the dust...he stops abruptly and addresses the camera: "I'll be wit' ya in a second folks, just as soon as I finish wit' nature boy here!" In response a rather large shotgun barrel enters from offscreen and slams up against Bugs' cranium! He turns to face his pursuer, adopting an expression of characteristic Bugs Bunny cool.
Then, I sit down at the drawing table and begin thumbnailing the hell out of my ideas, using what I've worked out in front of the mirror while reinterpreting it for Bugs' structure and looking for ways to "juice" it up. That is, trying to add that extra dimension which makes animation better than mere reality, that caricatures movement and expression in a way that makes it compelling to watch. Animation is a distillation of life.
As you recall, my scene involves Bugs racing over a hill towards us, passing us, stopping to deliver a wry line to camera, and getting a shot gun against his noggin. I usually tackle what I feel is the hardest part of a scene first. In this case I decided to concentrate on the line of dialogue and work my way "out" from there.
Well, not entirely. That is, parts of it are quite good, but we all decide that there's still lots of work to do: Bugs' run over the hill is too mechanical and repetitive, he's drawn too skinny, his dash past the camera is too slow and lacks energy, his timing during the dialogue could be tighter in places...the list seems endless. In fact, it is endless. Like all art you're never really finished, so you just have to prioritize and hope that you can get the scene as close to perfect as possible in the time you have left.
