Porky en Locolandia

Watching this fabulous pre-WWII creation, I was immediately reminded of the American cartoonist R. Crumb. What is interesting is that R. Crumb admitted to taking hallucinogenic drugs to draw his strange comics in the late 1960's. Of course, this cartoon with Porky Pig doesn't include Crumb's sense of pornography (thankfully). Crumb's comics are simply rehash seeing some of the inhabitants of Wackyland. I wonder what the illustrators back then did to create such fantastic off the wall stuff. Sure, there were some obvious inspirations in this cartoon (3 stooges) but just about everything is going insane!

Thoroughly enjoyable and liberating cartoon for 1938! I saw it in color on Cartoonland. I wonder if I saw the colorized version (It was in color...)

"Porky in Wackyland" is a true milestone in animation. It is an amazing example of no-holds-barred animation. It's very obvious the artists had a great time just letting their imaginations go wild on this one. The plot is simple, Porky Pig is searching for the last Do-Do bird. His quest leads him to Wackyland. In Wackyland anything can happen...that's what animation is all about if you ask me. Anything can be brought to life in animation, all you have to do is dream it and draw it. "Porky in Wackyland" represents many crazy dreams, and many wonderful drawings. And on top of it all, it's very funny!

This cartoon is an early pinnacle of animation insanity, the prototypical Warner Brothers short. A blitzkrieg of jokes, puns, and free-wheeling mayhem, WB-style cartoons sometimes equaled, but never surpassed, "Porky in Wackyland". Every square inch of every frame is packed with information that flows in several directions at once. Carl Stalling's score is as integral to this cartoon as any of the visual elements (and more so than the "script"). For these, and many other, reasons, "Porky in Wackyland" is the blueprint for the best of WB cartoons, as well as a signpost to various late-20th Century highbrow/lowbrow aesthetics.

Porky Pig goes on a hunt to catch the surreally elusive last Do-Do bird.

This cartoon has been credited as the 8th best cartoon ever made. I am not going to get into the minutia of deciding if it is better or worse than 8th, but it absolutely needs to be on that list, because it takes such a simple thing and makes it so strange.

The way I saw this was side by side with "Dough for the Do-Do". You could watch them individually, but side by side will blow your mind. Almost all of the scenes are identical, though some of the backgrounds are colored differently. Saying one is better than the other is hard to do.

Wow! Over sixty years later, this cartoon short stands out as one of the greatest achievements in this medium. Bob Clampett, given the complete freedom that producer Leon Schlesinger let him have, spun out some of the weirdest and wackiest ever made.

We start out with a typical beginning for that era, Porky Pig is flying to Darkest Africa to find the last Do-Do, worth billions. But what follows is a mind bending journey, where no one evidently studied the laws of physics. Some of the humor are stock Bob Clampett jokes that are repeated in others of his cartoons, but he was always best with visual humor, when he let the animation be the star of the show.