Le lion qui craignait les souris

The old circus lion is a mess. He's scared of a mouse. The mouse recounts how he used to be the king of the jungle until the day he met a fearless mouse.

This is a Tex Avery MGM cartoon. It's billed as a Tom and Jerry Cartoon although I don't think the mouse is supposed to be Jerry. Maybe it's a deconstruction of the Tom and Jerry cartoon. I would change the mouse narrator in the circus into another circus animal. It makes no sense that a mouse is scared of another mouse. You know what. It should Tom the cat and the mouse should be Jerry. There you go.

Just watched this Tex Avery cartoon on YouTube in which we see a lion in a wheelchair seeming a little docile. When he and the one pushing him pass a mouse, that mouse tells his story in flashback of when that lion used to roar real loud in the jungle and scare every animal. Then this same mouse came along...Boy, the way Avery milks all those scare gags, one after another, with constant visual expressions that go in places that made him one of the wildest of the animators during the wildest of cartoon decades: the '40s. Describing it truly won't do it justice, you just have to watch this thing like you would any Tex Avery of this period. So on that note, I highly recommend Slap Happy Lion.

Slap Happy Lion (1947) is another short from cartoon king Tex Avery. In this short, a mouse is the only creature in the jungle who'll stand up to the king of beasts. The lion scares the hell out of every creature in his domain except some dumb mouse. This troubles the lion who tries to do everything he can to teach this mouse a lesson.

A bizarre animated short from Tex Avery. Not only is the story crazy but the visuals and sight gags are outrageous and over the top. Another winner from the man!

Highly recommended.

A+

Brilliance need not be complex. In what is a series of sight gags, the audience is introduced to a lion that is crazy and the mouse that knows why. And that is all you need. Know what? It works. Tex Avery hits the viewer with absurd image after absurd image until he blasts it all apart with even sillier images. The short follows its own mad logic and creates a beautiful internal consistency. Ostensibly, the plot concerns a lion that used to be king of the jungle and is now rendered into a raving madman, or mad-lion. We know this because for six minutes, we're treated to crazy tableaux after crazy tableaux of the lion demonstrating his power and then falling prey to the very strength he used on the world around him. But that's the over-analyzed version. The real version is that funny things happen. And that's all that is needed to get the viewer to laugh- simple brilliance. The short is available on the 'Song of the Thin Man' DVD. Treat yourself.

In this Tex Avery short the meanest lion in the jungle does battle with a mouse. The sequence in which the lion scares the animals with his roaring is enough to make this worth watching. Just when you think they couldn't possibly come up with a crazier sight gag...Tex pulls out another one.