Le canari grand format

The gag with the cat, dog, bird, and mouse guzzling down "Jumbo Gro" to get bigger in an arms race of sorts is repeated quite a bit in this little cartoon from Tex Avery, but it also features clever bits of animation. One of the dog's eyes acting as a searchlight, for instance, or the bird rearranging the cat's face on his back before realizing it's scowling at him. Great voices for the dopey cat and streetwise mouse too, the latter of whom we naturally see reading "The Lost Squeek End." I don't read too much into possible Cold War symbolism because the intention seems to be much more about wacky exaggeration than it does political satire, but it was interesting that on the globe at the end, the cat stands over America and the mouse over the Soviet Union.

While I do not personally think this is Avery's best cartoon (that honor goes to The Legend of Rockabye Point) and this one is also not among my personal favorites, this is the ultimate in Tex Avery cartoons. Everything Avery strived to do is here-he loved taking a quasi-normal situation, tossing in a random, improbable element or three and then piling sight gag after sight gag, each one more outlandish than the ones before. The jokes are all sight gags. What dialogue there is is generally there as necessary for set-up and only one or two lines are even mildly funny. Just sight gags, as far as the eye can see, fast enough to register, but so fast that you almost don't have time to breathe because you're laughing so hard. This one makes you want to do things like hang spoons from your nose! Wildly silly and unforgettable, truly a masterpiece. This is a great cartoon! It worked 55 years ago and it works today. You have to see this one. Most highly recommended.

Whatever Tex Avery was smoking when he came up with this one should be instantly legalized and doled out to the creatively bankrupt. The Classic Avery 'toon, the one he could never quite top, and a joy to behold. Bird, Cat, Dog, and Mouse - in that order - drink from an unassuming-looking bottle of Jumbo-Grow plant food. I won't give away the ending, but I wouldn't mind a sequel if only to find out what could possibly happen next.

'King Size Canary' is one of MGM and Tex Avery's better animation shorts, and concentrates on what might happen if a hungry cat goes in search of food and finds a way to make everything larger! Of course this being cartoon fun you just know that whatever the cat makes larger will end up being too large, and that the gag will progress on and on to its inevitable conclusion. The main characters - cat, dog, bird and mouse - are funny and watchable; the animation is well drawn, and the cartoon is a diverting few minutes.

Although MGM's cartoons, Hanna and Barbera aside, are not known as much as the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies of Warner Bros., or the shorts made by Walt Disney, they are not at all bad and can still be appreciated today by any generation.

An alley cat struggles to find any food. He spots a nice home with a refrigerator. Only problem is the guard dog Atom. There turns out to be nothing in the house except a tiny mouse. In order to escape, the mouse directs the cat to a canary but the canary turns out to be tiny. That's when the cat finds a bottle of Jumbo Gro plant fertilizer. I like the premise up to a point. It grows out of room sort of speak.