La Ferme de demain

During his tenure at MGM, Tex Avery made some of the very best cartoon shorts ever made. Unfortunately, towards the end, I noticed a drop in the overall quality of the films he directed at MGM. Much of it is because he did what many other animators did in the mid-1950s...they switched to a much simpler and more garish animation style. Backgrounds were no longer finely detailed and bright colors often were used in place of details. And, the animation itself was simplified. But this is not the main problem with "The Farm of Tomorrow". The main problem is that this one just isn't all that funny and it's pretty forgettable...something you'd never say about earlier cartoons such as "Swingshift Cinderella" and "The Little 'Tinker".

Many years ago there were jokes that went "What you crossed a this with a that." They were fun. That's what most of this Tex Avery cartoon was about. It was entertaining but seemed a little hackneyed. A strength is that there is enough of a pause to let on figure out what is coming. Avery adds a little sexiness to a couple of these things, but it is sort of lacking in any sort of story.

Tex Avery offers some of the comic details of what he imagines scientific advances will bring to the farm.

It's amusing enough in its scattergun, listicle manner of offering its audience the wonders of scientific agronomy and its "we cross a chicken with a centipede to get more drumsticks" way; it was Avery's regular habit to stick as many gags into a cartoon as he could manage, and this certainly does that. Contrariwise, the simplified character design, lack of detailed backgrounding and limited animation make apparent that his budgets were not stretching as far as they had ten years earlier.

Tex Avery plays with biotechnology brought to farming in this cartoon short. Almost all of it involves animals being crossed with other animals or objects to produce amusing effects. For example, a cow is crossed with a kangaroo so the farmer can just extract bottles of milk from its pouch, rather than waste time milking it. That concept veers into other areas, like the giraffe crossed with a racehorse so it can lower its long neck and win by a nose, but it's repeated again and again, and most of them were pretty corny. I can't say it was terribly funny, but maybe my enjoyment was clouded by the dark overtones, e.g. The rise of factory farming after the war. It's always interesting to see something from Avery though.

This cartoon is a fairly funny look at the "future" of farming-a future that most farmers are probably grateful hasn't come in a great many respects! Typical of Avery, sight gags galore are fired at the viewer non-stop, with more puns than normal and more lunacy than usual. Good Avery, though not great Avery, even for the series of shorts this fits in with. Worth watching.