Momenti di caccia

When this short was released in theaters it was unfortunately attached to the horrid Macaulay Culkin vehicle "Richie Rich" (one can hardly call that piece of cinematic dreck a film). Well, I wanted to see "Chariots" and so did a couple of my friends, so we bought tickets for a matinee showing and sat back and enjoyed six minutes of pitch-perfect Coyote-Road Runner action. Then, once the credits rolled, we got up, declared that we had seen what we came to see, and walked out, to the bewilderment of most of the rest of the audience. It was a most satisfying exit, and a most satisfying film. Would that it were available on DVD.

The last Road Runner/Coyote short to be directed by the great Chuck Jones, released in theaters along with the Macaulay Culkin movie Richie Rich. I'm always wary of the later Looney Tunes cartoons made decades after the classic ones. They are usually forgettable at best and sometimes outright terrible. They never have the same level of quality craftsmanship that went into the older shorts. This one's no exception on that front but it is surprisingly watchable for a later effort. That's probably due to Jones' involvement as he crafted many of the classic Looney Tunes cartoons, particularly the Road Runner/Coyote ones. Among the better gags here are the ACME lightning bolts and the cactus costume. The biggest weakness is the audio. The music is irritatingly generic and probably canned. The sound effects in some places are bad, sounding disconnected in a way that just doesn't feel right. Despite some problems, it is watchable and even amusing in places. Fans of the old cartoons will likely see the flaws more than others.

The last Road Runner cartoon directed by Chuck Jones - hence the last real Road Runner cartoon - was "To Beep or Not to Beep", released in 1963. This one is now truly the last. It's really just more of the same. But that's the wonder of it: that after thirty-one years, the old studio crew long since dissolved, managed to create a Road Runner cartoon that neatly fits in with the rest of the series and is just as good - in fact, superior to most (the very best one, if you ask me, was "Lickety-Splat", released 1961).

Two things stand out. One is the music. Lacking Carl Stalling and his ability to dart unobtrusively from one half-familiar tune to the next, Jones has leaned heavily on one piece: the jesters' dance from Bedrich Smetana's opera, "The Bartered Bride", which is mostly unedited and entirely apt. What I didn't realise until I took another look at some of the older Road Runners recently is that Stalling had used Smetana's music all the time in the Road Runner series, whenever he wanted to convey speed and had no particular reason to convey anything else. I'm glad this music was allowed for once to dominate the cartoon. (There are, you'll notice, almost no sound effects.)

Secondly, there's an absence of what I'd call conceptual Road Runner humour. Here's an example (from another cartoon, I forget which): We see a long, elaborate, winding wooden gutter down the side of a small mountain. The camera starts at the bottom and slowly pans up. At the top is the Coyote, with one of those black spherical bombs. He lights the fuse. BANG. The bomb explodes. The gag is over. The whole rickety gutter apparatus was irrelevant. This is probably the funniest joke of its kind, and even so it's a bit of a cheat; you can get away with only so many gags like this, and no more, and they'd BETTER be this good to be worthy of being included at all (and sometimes, they weren't). The best Road Runner jokes take place WITHIN the world of the cartoon, and involve the Coyote being defeated by the very energy he was attempting to harness. "Chariots of Fur" is more classical than most other Road Runner cartoons, hence better.

'Chariots of Fur' is a Road Runner vs. Wile E. Coyote cartoon and it was released in 1994. Although it is made so many years after the others it fits perfectly in the series and in my opinion this is one of the better and more funny ones. Coyote tries to catch Road Runner with simple bird seed, a fake road and even a Halloween cactus costume.

Although most gags were pretty predictable they made me smile a lot. The jokes that were written on the screen worked very well. The little interlude where the Coyote plays the harp is brilliant, that ends with a perfectly timed gag. The animation is better than normal, which is not strange for a cartoon from the nineties, and the music fits that animation wonderfully. A great cartoon.

CHARIOTS OF FUR (1994) is a great example of the inexperienced CJFP artists' prowess, as they have recreated almost perfectly the Golden Age cartoon style. It is not perfect in this cartoon, since it's their first cartoon, but in SUPERIOR DUCK (1996) you can't tell the difference. This cartoon is equal to TO BEEP OR NOT TO BEEP (1963), which is the last Road Runner cartoon made at Termite Terrace. The rest were made independently. That's a tribute to the young artists at Chuck Jones Film Productions. Jones taught them well.