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+

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.

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.

When director Tex Avery left Looney Toons to work at MGM, there was a marked change in his work. Suddenly, his cartoons had an insanity to them that set them apart from his peers....and his MGM films are classics. Just watch "Swing Shift Cinderella", "Bad Luck Blackie" or "Little 'Tinker" and you'll see what I mean...he was responsible for the strangest, funniest and most surreal cartoons of his age. However, compared to these bizarro films, his "Slap Happy Lion" is amazingly normal.

The story begins with a lion being carted from the zoo to the booby hatch. Then a small mouse explains what brought the lion to this point....and the short consists of this same mouse terrorizing the lion...much like Jerry the Mouse terrorizes Tom the Cat.

This is a good film despite its lack of weirdness. Worth seeing.

A mouse tells the tale of how he drove a lion insane with terror in this Tex Avery cartoon.

It's a fine cartoon, and had anyone but Avery directed this, it would have been a classic. Avery's MGM cartoons, however, were so continually brilliant, that they have to be considered by the standards of his work, and so this one is just standard brilliant. It's one comic cartoon bit after another, in seemingly endless parade, until he's filled up the time limit, and it ends quickly. That's a standard feature of Avery's cartoons: it's series of gags linked by a situation, less than the story-telling techniques that almost every other cartoon maker used. True, there is a story of sorts, but that disappears under the constant barrage of jokes, leaving the capping joke at the end fairly weak.

Still, even standard Avery is among the best. If you don't know this one, it's tremendous fun.