Reviews - In Depth - Essays - Books - MAIN PAGE - Odds & Ends - Links - Questions

Odds & Ends

Sunday, April 30, 2006

The Funniest Cartoon Ever?
Jerry Beck, co-author of the site Cartoon Brew and one of the most knowledgeable people on animation around, has let slip on the Golden Age Cartoon Forums that a collection of Tex Avery cartoons is potentially on the way:
At this time, there are no plans to release any MGM cartoons as collections on DVD - except for the TEX AVERY cartoons, which will hopefully be restored in time for release NEXT year (no promises however)...

Unlike the Tom & Jerry sets, George Feltenstein is personally overseeing this one.
Beck is in a position to know, being "in" with Warner Bros., who own the MGM cartoon library, so this is great news. (The significance of the reference to Feltenstein is that he oversees Warner Home Video's classics division: if he is in charge, it means the DVDs are being given a respectful treatment, as happened for the Looney Tunes, rather than the more slapdash release given to the Tom and Jerry series. This is crucial not just for the quality of prints and extra features, but for the chances of seeing the cartoons uncut).

An Avery set is pretty much the holy grail for classic animation fans on DVD, now that so much of the Warners and Disney catalogue has been released. Avery, for a long time, was considered pretty much the greatest of the non-Disney directors from the classic era of Hollywood cartoons, due in no small part to Joe Adamson's book Tex Avery: King of Cartoons, which was one of the earliest full length studies of the field. While these things can never be quantified, I get the impression that in recent years his reputation has slipped a bit, with most thinking his successor at Warners, Bob Clampett, was a better director. (I wrote about Clampett here).

I certainly prefer Clampett's cartoons: at his best, I think he out-Averied Avery, if that makes any sense. Yet Avery was more of a trailblazer. It was Avery, in his time at Warners, who started the shift to crazier humour, and when he moved to MGM he perfected his style. The most famous trait of Avery's cartoons are their extreme "takes," although this aspect of his work is not as central as some of his less skilled imitators (like the makers of The Mask) seem to think. Perhaps more crucial is his emphasis on speed and escalation, with gags building on each other in a rapid-fire, cumulative manner. Yet I think Clampett made funnier cartoons in a similar style, while also managing to foster some actual characters: Avery made the breakthrough Bugs Bunny short, A Wild Hare, but then proved unable to come up with a notable cartoon character for MGM. I also think Clampett had slightly better collaborators: I'm thinking particularly of his master animator Rod Scribner, and composer Carl Stalling. (MGM's composer, Scott Bradley, was very talented, but his scores always sound a little too brash and aggressive: Stalling's jaunty melodies work better for me).

Having said all that, Avery still made some of the best animated shorts ever, and once they are released on DVD many of the absolute best shorts of the Golden Age will be available. And then we animation couch potatoes can settle down, watch the great cartoons of the era one after the other, and get into the serious business of fan-ish arguments about serious questions. Like: what's the funniest cartoon ever?

Such questions never have a single right answer, obviously, but the fun is in coming up with the nominations. I would consider several of Clampett's films up there: A Corny Concerto, Kitty Kornered, and The Great Piggy Bank Robbery, for example (all these are on the Looney Tunes DVDs). Chuck Jones' shorts are a little less inclined to side-splitting hilarity, but there are a few of his that are in contention too: Rabbit of Seville, No Barking and perhaps Duck! Rabbit, Duck! or Robin Hood Daffy. Avery's strongest nomination, in my mind, is not one of his more famous "Red" pictures or the overrated King Size Canary, but Bad Luck Blackie, which you can see here. (I'm not crazy about copyrighted works being hosted online, but this isn't available anywhere else: just make sure you support the DVD sales when it's released).

Seeing a low quality clip on the net doesn't do the film justice: it's a remarkable short to see with an audience, because you realise how good Avery's instinct for audience response was. Avery not only judges the internal timing of each gag perfectly, but also knows how to space the jokes to let them build on each other. There's a merciless beauty to the speed with which the black cat's bad luck is visited on the bulldog, but it's the timing between each such gag that creates the film's cumulative impact.

This effect is strengthened by the way each gag is tied to all the others: the film conditions us to a particular sequence of events - the small white cat will blow the whistle, the black cat will cross the bulldog's path, and an object will fall on the bulldog's head - and then starts varying them each time the joke is repeated. The progression of ever larger and / or more unlikely objects hitting the bulldog is inevitable, but Avery and his story man, Rich Hogan add more value by playing with everything each time the gag recurs. Each time the whistle blows, there's a funny variation on where the black cat appears from, the manner in which he crosses, the object that falls, and the consequence of the impact. (Even the music that plays as the cat crosses is played around with). Each gag, than, is actually a little cluster of mini-gags that all reinforce each other, and which add up to sequence of multiple simultaneous running jokes. By the end of the film, the Pavlovian response to the "whistle blows / object falls" sequence has become so strong that Avery can dispense with the black cat entirely and simply drop the object, as in the famous penultimate shot, in which the whistle brings a piano, a steamroller, a plane, a bus and then a battleship plummeting from the sky. I doubt many people notice the omission of the cat: at the end of the day, comic logic is stronger and more important than story logic. The film as a whole is not just one of the funniest cartoons ever made, but also a textbook example of cartoon joke construction at its very best.

Note: If you find any of this interesting, you really should check out Thad Komorowski's remarkable blog Identifying Animators and Their Scenes, which in a short time has become vital reading for animation buffs. Not only does he delve into the usually obscure business of exactly who did what, but he has come up with remarkably revealing posts like this one, which contrasts directorial styles by comparing the way Bob Clampett and Friz Freleng timed identical gags.

Labels:



Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 30.4.06

Comments: Post a Comment
<< Home

Back to Odds & Ends Main Page


This page is for assorted musings and editorialising that don't fit elsewhere on Cinephobia.

It was formerly referred to as "Rumours and Ruminations" but has been renamed to better represent the haphazard nature of what appears here.


Want to contact me?
Click here

Google