Porky in the North Woods

When animal refuge owner Porky Pig sets up signs prohibiting hunting, trapping, fishing - in fact, pretty much everything - a hunter naturally decides to engage in all these illegal activities. So, Porky has to free his animal friends, and thereby incurs the hunter's wrath. But when the animals see the hunter abusing Porky...well, were Bugs Bunny present, he would affirm just one thing: Of course you realize this means war! And brother, let me tell you: not even in any of the grade-Z horror movies about nature's vengeance do you get to see any of what you see here! They don't identify where specifically "Porky in the North Woods" takes place, although I presume that it's in northern Canada. If so, then it corroborates every good thing that Michael Moore says about our northern neighbor.

But anyway, this is a pretty neat cartoon. Obviously, it was an early one, so we shouldn't expect any of the really crazy stuff that became the cornerstone of the Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies cartoons of the '40s and '50s. But it's still an OK one.

Porky Pig protects the natural world in his Game Refuge. He has put up a lot of NO signs. Jean-Baptiste is a hunter who refuses to obey the signs and sets up lots of traps. Porky rescues a beaver from a trap, but that's only the beginning. He brings all the animals to his cabin for treatment. Jean-Baptiste follow the tracks to the cabin and accuses Porky of stealing his catches.

Porky Pig is the nature defender. It is a black and white cartoon with an earlier version. I still like it but it is a rougher drawing style. I do like Porky being an environmentalist and naturist. That's a good look on him.

Porky Pig has created a sanctuary for woodland animals. However, the jerk French-Canadian trapper, Jean Baptiste doesn't care and soon invades Porky's property to kill animals! Porky tries to stop him and gets beaten up. Is there no one left to stop the evil Baptiste?

This is a well drawn and reasonably entertaining cartoon. While the stuff Looney Tunes made in the 1940s was a lot better, for 1936 this is awfully good and worth seeing even today.

Porky in the North Woods (1936)

*** (out of 4)

Porky is working in the North Woods as an animal protector. He owns some land where all animals are safe and he demands no fishing, no hunting and no trapping. Of course, there's one hunter who decides to set some traps and he's not too happy when Porky lets the animals out.

PORKY IN THE NORTH WOODS is another fun entry for the animated series. The series was still quite young here but this was certainly one of the better shorts up to this time. There are all sorts of good moments in the film but the highlight has to be the sequence where Porky must save various animals stuck in the traps. Seeing what the animals look like when they're removed was quite funny. Overall this film has a very fast-pace, there's some nice animation and of course some good action.

Many of the great Warner Bros. cartoons seemed to suggest a humane, anti-hunting message. Elmer Fudd, the greatest dupe of them all, was frequently a hunter and in almost every hunting picture, regardless of who played the hunter, the prey came out on top. Frank Tashlin's 'Porky in the North Woods' makes this anti-hunting angle explicit, casting Porky as the owner of a stretch of forest in which animal cruelty of any kind is forbidden. Enter Jean Batiste, a hunter who is determined to ignore this. In a typically brilliant, cinematic approach, Tashlin only shows Batiste is shadow for the first half of the cartoon, making him all the more threatening. When he finally puts in a proper appearance, he brutalises Porky in quite an extreme way, all of which makes his inevitable comeuppance all the more satisfying.

A beautiful, strongly ethical cartoon, 'Porky in the North Woods' occasionally suffers from overly cute characters, chiefly the irritating beavers. I've loved beavers all my life, they've always been one of my favourite animals, yet 'Porky in the North Woods' occasionally makes me want to kill beavers! It's a shame because, when they're not talking in their grating childlike voices, the beaver characters have some fantastic moments such as their war over an apple. Another element which is often cited as a flaw in 'Porky in the North Woods' is Tashlin's very quick cuts between scenes but I actually find this technique exhilarating. Probably used mainly because Tashlin had too many ideas for a mere seven minutes, these cuts increase the already occasionally frantic pace, making 'Porky in the North Woods' a thrillingly hectic cartoon. Unfortunately, the ending is extraordinarily cloying but it's nowhere near bad enough to significantly taint this great cartoon.