O Canarinho Gigante

Tex Avery, IMHO, is probably hands-down the best at his craft. Current stuff -- just that, stuff. The closest I've seen of recent work would have to be the four Roger Rabbit/Baby Herman cartoons (including the short that opened the film, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?").

This simple premise -- starving cat & undersized intended snack -- is complicated by a miraculous growth fertilizer and spirals rapidly out of control to a completely ridiculous conclusion.

I was lucky enough to own the box-set of laserdiscs which included every cartoon Tex Avery made for MGM, and I would have paid three times what I did for it. Although this particular cartoon wasn't my favorite (I might have to lean toward one of the two versions of "Northwest Hounded Police" in which double-takes and eyeball gags are elevated to an art form), it was certainly in the upper levels. Another high-ranking short: "Bad Luck Blackie", in which a black cat simply struts in front of a surprisingly vicious bulldog to bring him instant -- and potentially lethal -- bad luck.

Try to see these shorts unedited, not the hacked 'politically correct' versions being shown on some cable cartoon shows. Absolutely the best animation for sheer hilarity that has ever been committed to celluloid.

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.

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.

Of Tex Avery's three masterpieces, "King-Size Canary" is the best of the lot. (In case you're wondering, the other two are "Who Killed Who?" and "Red Hot Riding Hood," both 1943.) This has to be seen to be believed, let alone appreciated. I once tried to describe it to a friend, one who admitted affection for Chuck Jones' Bugs/Daffy/Elmer hunting trilogy from Warner Bros., and failed miserably to do it justice. The insanity builds from a merely amusing opening to a mind-boggling yet inevitable finale, an image that will stay with you for some time after the fade-out.

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.