Le lion qui craignait les souris

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.

This cartoon is a prime example of Tex Avery's brilliance and how producer Fred Quimby could pick'em. Slap Happy Lion show's us how too much confidence can run short to the unlikeliest of foes. Avery delivers gag after gag with the goofiest lion flexing his king of the jungle muscles with roaring laughter. This is truly one of the reasons why I've always been a fan of vintage cartoons from the MGM studios in a time when shorts such as these were seen only at the theater. A true hidden treasure of the Avery archives...8 out of 10.

Slap Happy Lion can also be found appropriately as a special feature on the classic Thin Man series finale "Song of the Thin Man" on DVD.

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.

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.

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.