The best Funny Animals from Ape to Zazu

Don’t we all wish we were Bugs Bunny? Hilarious, almost never rattled, and getting the best of everyone he encounters: Warner Bros.’ signature cartoon character is one for the ages. Bugs could spar off against Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, or Daffy Duck, and always end with a smiling fourth-wall shrug to the screen. Bugs benefited from classic animation directors like Chuck Jones, and of course, his vocal characterization by the unparalleled Mel Blanc, where he was the star in Blanc’s humongous collection of voices. Bugs’ laid-back wisecrackery made him an instant hit in his 1940 debut A Wild Hare, where he was a mashup of Clark Gable’s character in It Happened One Night and Groucho Marx in everything. He went on to star in more than 100 short features in which he gamely tackled horror, the medieval, Westerns, sci-fi, even the opera. Bugs is the cool persona we all wish we had, the one with the stunning comeback that most of us only think of the next day. No wonder he beat out Mickey Mouse to become the first cartoon character on a postage stamp in 1997. [Gwen Ihnat]

A character so agreeable he’s been voiced by, Baloo The Bear’s lackadaisical attitude toward life makes him a lot of fun to hang out with, as do his musical tendencies. But he’d also do anything for a friend, which is why everyone wants him to be theirs. [Katie Rife]

Together with his pal and/or brother chipmunk Dale, Chip was introduced to the cartoon world with a 1943 cartoon called “Private Pluto.” Though they looked and acted like real chipmunks then, they’d later adopt Funny Animal characteristics, with Chip ultimately copping an Indiana Jones-styled getup for the animated series Chip ’N Dale Rescue Rangers. While Dale is the dimwitted, bucktoothed one, Chip is the ’munk with the brain, a quick thinker who can be a little bossy. This has a tendency to wear on him a bit—even exaggerated cartoons need a break sometimes—but it’s his sense of responsible propriety (and occasional goofiness) that lands Chip a spot on this list. [Marah Eakin]

If we are to be judged by how we handle ourselves in times of crisis, then Courage is hysterical. Voiced to panicky perfection by Marty Grabstein, the darkly funny ’toon gets a lot of laughs out of Courage’s yelps and physical contortions in the face of danger. [Cameron Scheetz]

The term “hangdog” might as well originate from the sagging face, sorrowful voice, and dry wit of this Tex Avery creation. But just as Droopy’s greetings to the “happy people” in the audience contradicted his generally mild manner, so did his unassuming nature belie the chaos of his theatrical shorts. Surrounded by some of the wildest action MGM ever put on screen, Droopy is the calm in the eye of the storm, the counterpoint to frenetic cross-country dashes, gravity-defying reactions, and other outrageous sight gags. At least once a picture, he’s allowed to indulge in some Avery-style nuttiness, but those exclamation points are never as funny as the deadpan periods he dots throughout “Dumb-Hounded,” “Northwest Hounded Police,” or his cameo as a careless Toontown elevator operator in . [Erik Adams]

Eeyore, being the cuddly, anthropomorphized personification of clinical depression, isn’t a “funny” animal, per se. With his gloomy voice, downtrodden expression, and that sad, tacked-on tail—not to mention the rain cloud that follows him around—Eeyore just can’t match the energy or enthusiasm of his friends in the Hundred Acre Wood. It doesn’t help that pretty much every house he has ever lived in was destroyed, in one fashion or another. But life isn’t always sunshine and honey pots, and everybody either knows an Eeyore, or is one themselves. [Katie Rife]

The Looney Tunes creators didn’t do a lot of direct parodies, preferring to go broader with their star characters by dreaming up a stammering pig, a kooky duck, a seductive skunk, and so on. But Foghorn Leghorn was actually an homage to (or rip-off of) somebody else’s comedy routine: Kenny Delmar’s blustery Dixie politician Senator Claghorn, first featured on Fred Allen’s radio show in the 1940s. Less than year after Delmar started doing Claghorn on the air, director Robert McKimson and voice-actor Mel Blanc cooked up their tall, cagey rooster character, who went over so well with movie audiences that he became part of the regular Warner Bros. animation rotation. A lazy, know-it-all chatterbox with a knack for talking his way out of trouble, Foghorn Leghorn built on the rudiments of his inspiration, such that now whenever a person speaks in a broad southern accent and punctuates sentences with “ah say” and “that is,” everyone assumes they’re doing Foghorn, not Claghorn. [Noel Murray]

Naysayers like to shit on Garfield for his banal obsessions with lasagna and Mondays, but for kids reading the funny pages in the ’80s and ’90s, the fat orange tabby’s more basic qualities just made him easier to understand. Garfield’s blandness gives him a universal appeal, and Garfield is the most widely distributed syndicated comic strip in the world. ( claim that 4 percent of the world’s population reads Garfield every day.) Creator Jim Davis has never made any secret of his crass commercial intentions for the character, and billions of dollars in books, T-shirts, coffee mugs, and plush toys with suction-cup feet bearing his visage are still sold every year. And while even Davis should have been embarrassed by the Garfield feature films, is a classic seasonal child-traumatizer. Besides, without Garfield, there would be no . [Katie Rife]

Cartoon mice get to play, regardless of whether their counterpart cats are away. Itchy (he’s the mouse, not the cat—) prefers “-play” as a suffix, as in gunplay, knife-play, bomb-play, mallet-play, rocket-play, stethoscope-play—the list goes on and on, just like and its Funny Animal show-within-the-show. Twenty-seven years after his Tracey Ullman Show debut, Itchy is one of the few Simpsons characters who’s remained more or less the same: He’s gained a Mickey Mouse-style origin story, a Walt Disney-esque creator, and an Ub Iwerks-type dispute over creator credit, but he’s still the bucktoothed sadist who appeared in “The Bart Simpson Show.” Itchy and Scratchy were conceived as an ultra-violent send-up of Tom and Jerry (among other cat-and-mouse duos), and they remain ultra-violent send-ups of Tom and Jerry, demonstrating that the one trait of their inspiration that they mimicked the best is their longevity. [Erik Adams]

From the moment that the animals first encounter King Julien leading his many followers in the annoyingly catchy “I Like To Move It,” that royal lemur pretty much walked away with the entire movie series (give or take some scheming penguins). Sacha Baron Cohen’s over-the-top portrayal helped, as the delusional Julien was constantly convinced he was being chased by the paparazzi and admired by the masses, followed around by toadies Maurice and Mort. Still, he leaves his followers behind to follow the Madagascar four to New York, and falls in love with a bear en route (naturally) in , the Citizen Kane of Madagascar movies. Like the penguins, Julien’s popularity soon led to his own Netflix series, All Hail King Julien, where his vocalization was taken over by Danny Jacobs. And he’s still never met a dance song, or a tranquilizer dart, he didn’t love. [Gwen Ihnat]

George Herriman’s offbeat creation is, in a very real sense, the wellspring for websites like The A.V. Club. The comic strip, which ran from 1913 to 1944, was one of the very first then-“lowbrow” cartoon creations to be treated seriously, with the passionate and critical eye brought to its pop culture now an everyday phenomenon. Thanks to the fandom of William Randolph Hearst, the comic survived despite middling popularity—Hearst was such an admirer, he gave Herriman a lifetime contract and complete creative freedom—and was often the sole reason the strip continued to run in Hearst papers. The florid, experimental panels, meta situations and dialogue, and gentle poetic spirit became the source material for legions of subsequent cartoonists (including a short-lived Krazy Kat animated show in the ’60s). Its influence can be seen in the ramshackle American southwest backdrop of Chuck Jones’ Wile E. Coyote cartoons, to the oddball cast and landscapes of everything from Calvin And Hobbes to Bloom County. That a simpleminded cat and his unrequited love for an exasperated mouse can still resonate so strongly, more than a hundred years since its creation, is testament to the power of Herriman’s work. [Alex McCown]

An anthropomorphic worm clad in a Tyrolean hat, tube shirt, and one red shoe, Lowly Worm was . Though he in Scarry’s many books, he’s a real chatterbox in the animated versions of the tales, including The Busy World Of Richard Scarry and Busytown Mysteries. As Huckle Cat’s best friend, Lowly is a bit of an enigma. He attends elementary school, but he also drives a helicopter car that looks like an apple. He also once , something that’s pretty weird considering Lowly doesn’t really have a leg. Either way, Lowly’s a great character, all nattily attired and up for anything. Scarry’s widow even said that Lowly was her late husband’s favorite creation. [Marah Eakin]

Mickey Mouse is the Funny Animal that started it all. Mickey was one of the first and favorite creations of the Walt Disney company, which still uses a short clip from the 1928 Mickey debut Steamboat Willie at the start of its productions. Since that debut, Mickey Mouse has become a bonafide pop-culture icon, with everything from his own classic line of wristwatches to various versions of a Mickey Mouse Club. On-screen, his appearances have mostly been limited to shorts, with a few cinematic standouts like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in 1940’s or 1947’s inspired version of Mickey And The Beanstalk, during the era when he was voiced by Disney himself. Later efforts like 1999’s Once Upon A Christmas and The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse series didn’t really do the character justice. Recently, however, Disney has gone back to the Mickey Mouse well with a series of excellent shorts: While they evoke the nostalgic Mickey of decades past, they embrace the manic sensibilities of today’s animation, resulting in one of the best new products on the Disney Channel, breathing new life into this classic character. [Gwen Ihnat]

Norbert’s humor is arguably second to his handsomeness—he’s the all-American blond with a great head of hair from Nickelodeon’s The Angry Beavers—but subtle suits him, allowing him to absorb some of his brother Daggett’s off-the-wall comedy. Take for example the quirk he has of mispronouncing words, a simple gag that only adds to his charisma. But it is his sarcasm and knack for inventive sing-song insults that makes him the funnier of the two bachelor brothers. Take for example this ditty from from season three’s third episode, which is sung after Dag pukes: “Ohhhh here it comes and it’s my crumbs it’s kind of crummy, not too yummy. It’s everywhere it in my hair, but I don’t care cause I’m a bear with underwear. So don’t ya stare, I’m in my wear and Dags blowin’ chunks, which up to now is in a cow! A la la la!” [Becca James]

very consciously designed his Bloom County strip in the mold of Doonesbury, Peanuts, and Pogo, intending to bring more topical humor to the newspaper comics page via a motley assortment of broken adults, precocious kids, and talking animals. Very quickly though, the cartoon’s larger cast of fauna gave way to one breakout character: Opus, a literally wide-eyed penguin whose naiveté and boyish sense of optimism made him an immediate fan favorite. Opus was so popular that even after Breathed retired the strip (before bringing it back recently), he featured the penguin back in nearly every major project he subsequently attempted, from the children’s books A Wish For Wings That Work and Goodnight Opus to the Sunday-only strips Outland and Opus. Breathed learned the lesson that so many other newspaper cartoonists haves grasped before him, that it’s easier to sell satire to the American people if it comes with a healthy side of cute. [Noel Murray]

It’s unfortunately easy to forget that most of the characters on SpongeBob SquarePants qualify for this A.V. To Z, probably because the eponymous undersea pineapple dweller looks more like a kitchen project than a porous multicellular organism. And that’s just the type of slight that would send microscopic Bikini Bottom tyrant Plankton into an apoplectic fit. Given bellowing life by SpongeBob writer-actor Doug “Mr. Lawrence” Lawrence, Plankton is the show’s perennial comic MVP, an aquatic Napoleon who’s married to a computer and singularly obsessed with a rival restaurateurs’ secret recipe. (And now that we’ve typed all that out, it makes even more sense why SpongeBob doesn’t immediately scream “Funny Animals.”) [Erik Adams]

William Hanna and Joseph Barbera were ahead of the curve among animation impresarios in making the movie from theatrical shorts to television cartoons. In 1959, a year after finding massive success with the syndicated The Huckleberry Hound Show, Hanna-Barbera combined their increasingly popular “limited animation” style with the TV Western craze, and created Quick Draw McGraw, a brave-but-dimwitted horse in a cowboy hat. Voiced by Daws Butler and mostly written by Looney Tunes genius Michael Maltese, Quick Draw fought crime as a sheriff alongside his Mexican burro deputy Baba Looey, and sometimes went in disguise as the Zorro-esque El Kabong. As the Hanna-Barbera cartoon family grew, Quick Draw always remained a part of the larger cast, even if he eventually became less popular than characters like Yogi Bear or Scooby Doo. He was a horse with a big heart and a small brain—as lovable as he was preposterous. [Noel Murray]

A naive Boy Scout type in an aviator helmet, Rocky The Flying Squirrel represents all-American optimism in that most Cold War of cartoon series, The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show. Despite being saddled with his dim-witted sidekick Bullwinkle the moose, Rocky always foils the schemes devised by shifty Russian spies Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale using his “Jet Age” flying skills. (Yes, it’s usually by mistake, but the good guys have to win, right?) With The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show still occasionally airing in syndication 50 years after its original run ended in 1964, Rocky and Bullwinkle will continue to influence generations of animators. [Katie Rife]

Leonardo led, Donatello did machines, Michelangelo was “a party dude”—but no one can agree if Raphael is “cool, but rude” or “cool, but crude.” Whatever the correct answer is, it makes him the most complex hero in a half shell—and the funniest to boot. [Erik Adams]

Charles Schulz became one of the most respected newspaper cartoonists in America almost from the moment his strip Peanuts debuted in 1950, but his peers thought Schulz had gone off the rails when later in the decade he started drawing his dog character Snoopy as a biped with a rich fantasy life. As it turned out, that radical break from the “reality” of the strip was largely responsible for exponentially expanding Peanuts’ popularity. Whenever Snoopy was front-and-center, the comic leavened its melancholy depiction of childhood with dashes of pure whimsy. The daydreaming beagle gave its creator an excuse to comment on whatever his obsessions might be at the time, be it WWI aviation, ice skating, tennis, novel writing, or college campus life as seen through the eyes of “Joe Cool.” Plus, from a marketing standpoint, Snoopy was cheerier than his owner Charlie Brown, and thus easier to slap onto toys and bedsheets. For the most part, Peanuts was narrowly focused on handful of moody kids in a small exurban neighborhood, but Snoopy’s adventures ranged from Petaluma to France—even if he never actually left the top of his doghouse. [Noel Murray]

Winnie The Pooh’s boisterous friend, taken straight from A.A. Milne’s books, adds a jarring dose of energy to the Hundred Acre Wood. Tigger likely had equal numbers of fans and detractors, but you can’t deny that he also had a fabulous theme song, and was excellent at livening things up when Eeyore was in one of his usual doldrums. Tigger’s distinctive voice was courtesy of ventriloquist Paul Winchell, who went on to personify other famous cartoons and kids’ characters such as Wacky Races’ Dick Dastardly, The Banana Splits’ Fleegle, and Smurfs nemesis Gargamel. But it’s Tigger’s debut in 1968’s Winnie The Pooh And The Blustery Day that most associate with that raspy voice. Tigger may be hard to manage, but he’s also fiercely loyal, someone you’d totally want to have your back while hunting Heffalumps and Woozles. [Gwen Ihnat]

Voiced originally by Nathan Lane in the original , the meerkat half of one of Disney’s most beloved comedic duos thinks he’s smarter than he really is, which is why it’s a good thing his pal Pumbaa is such a simple creature. Together, though, they make it work. [Katie Rife]

Though Underdog truly nabs the “U” title due to a general lack of U-named animals, he’s a pretty good candidate all the same. The heroic alter-ego of the meager Shoeshine Boy, Underdog is the rhyming superdog the world needed in the mid-’60s.With his droopy uniform and oversized cape, Underdog is more comedic than imposing, especially considering how much collateral damage he generally incurs while attempting to save the day. Still, he’s imbued with the powers of supersonic flight, X-ray vision, atomic breath, and ultrasonic hearing—to name a few—and more often than not, Underdog not only saves the day but gets the girl, that poor Sweet Polly Purebred. [Marah Eakin]

Arrested Development’s Will Arnett now has quite a voice-over career, most famously with his recent hilarious turn as ’s Batman. But in one of his first such efforts, his voice is almost unrecognizable. Arnett played Vlad, the evil vulture in 2008’s underrated , sounding like the vulture version of Boris Badenov. An unnamed eagle in Dr. Seuss’ book, Vlad really comes into his own in the movie, offering Horton’s most exciting adventure sequences as the benevolent elephant (voiced by Jim Carrey) tries to save the Whoville speck from Vlad’s menace. But even this bloodthirsty vulture turns it around in the end, when he’s impressed by Horton’s efforts to mend fences with the Sour Kangaroo. Note: This Vlad is not to be confused with Vlad the rabbit, who bakes cookies. [Gwen Ihnat]

It may be hard to imagine now, but there was a time when people didn’t believe that bears could be funny. Back before Baloo and Fozzie Bear were yucking it up to widespread acclaim, Yogi Bear was a trailblazer in every sense of the word. Introduced to American audiences as a supporting player in Hanna-Barbera’s The Huckleberry Hound Show, Yogi broke through in a big way, becoming one of the groundbreaking animation house’s signature creations, eventually headlining many, many shows of his own. So what’s the appeal? Channeling the friendly, blue collar demeanor of The Honeymooners’ Ed Norton, Yogi was an everyman (or, everybear, rather), chumming it up with his fellow creatures and always coming up with quirky schemes to get his hands on some pic-a-nic baskets. He’s the kind of charming, good-natured character you’ d be happy to throw back some beers with, that is, if alcohol were permitted in Jellystone Park. [Cameron Scheetz]