Something New Has Been Added: Inside Tex Avery’s Madcap Animated Universe By  Donald Liebenson

“The secret in animating is first to have an everlasting sense of humor, next to be able to see the commonplace in a funny way and most important of all, to be able to sketch your idea so that the other person will think it's funny."—Tex Avery, The Dallas Morning News, 1933

At the start of Fred “Tex” Avery’s RED HOT RIDING HOOD (‘43), the Wolf, Red Riding Hood and even Grandma rebel against a traditional rendering of the classic fairy tale and threaten to quit the cartoon right then and there. “Every cartoon studio in Hollywood has done it this way,” Red complains. “I’m pretty sick of it myself,” Grandma chimes in. And just like that, something new had been added, with a cat-calling, zoot-suit-bedecked Wolf cruising Hollywood Blvd.; Red Hot Riding Hood (aka that Sweetheart of Swing) knockin’ ‘em dead at a Hollywood night club; and a slang-slinging Grandma (“Hiya cousin, what’s buzzin?’”) waiting for a wolf of her own in her penthouse digs.

RED HOT RIDING HOOD kicks off TCM’s early morning tribute to Tex Avery, which will easily be the funniest thing you see all day. The cartoons will be preceded by John Needham’s British documentary TEX AVERY: KING OF CARTOONS (‘88). It is an ideal primer into the Avery-verse that charts his legendary career from high school cartoonist through his tenures with Walter Lantz Productions, Warner Bros. and MGM. Along with a generous sampling of clips from his Warner Bros. and MGM cartoons, there are priceless interviews with equally legendary colleagues such as Chuck Jones, Heck Allen and Mike Lah, along with June Foray, the Queen of Cartoons and Joe Adamson, who wrote the essential book, also titled Tex Avery: King of Cartoons. (Coincidence, isn’t it?)

Needham told TCM he was encouraged to make the documentary by Chuck Jones, whom Needham had profiled for the BBC arts series, Omnibus. “He simply said, ‘We should make a film about Tex,” he said. As an Avery fan himself, Needham was all in. “I think it’s his ability to take a gag to the extremes and then take it further and then take it even further,” he said. “Chuck said that he could never copy Tex because he didn’t have a clue what Tex was doing, he just knew that he was a genius. I’m sure I don’t know either, but what he did was incredibly funny.”

The seven cartoons included in the TCM tribute meet the “incredibly funny” standard. They were produced for MGM. These are not as well known or as widely seen as his cartoons for Warner Bros., where, most notably, Avery directed A WILD HARE (’40), the cartoon that established Bugs Bunny’s brash personality. Avery was an outlier at the tony studio that boasted “more stars than there are in the heavens.” MGM did make sparkling and sophisticated romantic comedies directed by the likes of George Cukor and Ernst Lubitsch, but MGM was where clowns went to die.

Buster Keaton wrote in his memoir that signing with MGM was “the worst mistake” of his career. THE CAMERMAN (’28) was an auspicious beginning, but gradually, Keaton lost the lion’s share of his creative control, suffered studio interference and was partnered with Jimmy Durante. The Marx Brothers’ association with the studio likewise began promisingly with A NIGHT AT THE OPERA (‘35), but soon the iconoclastic highs of the brothers’ Paramount films were but a dim memory and the brothers were relegated to playing second fiddle to insipid romantic leads like Kenny Baker and Florence Rice in AT THE CIRCUS (‘39).

But MGM could not tame Tex Avery. Or perhaps studio execs didn’t think animation was worth the time and trouble to meddle with, allowing him to work unimpeded. The best of the cartoons he made for the studio between 1942-55 put the “mad” in madcap, if that’s your idea of a good time. In his book, Adamson observes: “No artist, in any century, on any continent, in any medium, has ever succeeded in creating his own universe as thoroughly and overwhelmingly as Tex Avery.”

You might say that a Tex Avery cartoon is like that proverbial box of chocolates; you never know what you’re going to get. “Say, what kind of a cartoon is this gonna be, anyway?” asks the title character in SCREWBALL SQUIRREL (‘44), another of the Avery 7 to be featured in TCM’s mini-Avery-palooza. Well, it’s NOT going to be a charming Disney-esque romp with adorable forest creatures. Screwball Squirrel sees to that when he takes one of them behind a tree and violently disposes of him, assuring the audience, “The funny stuff will start as soon as the phone rings.”

BAD LUCK BLACKIE and KING-SIZE CANARY, two masterpieces that are highlights of TCM’s Avery cartoon block, break all rules of the physical world and nature. In the former, a black cat brings instant bad karma each time he crosses the path of a bullying bulldog. At one point, the unfortunate pooch must dodge a succession of falling objects that escalate from a sink to a battleship. In the latter, a chase between a cat, mouse and dog escalates to gigantic proportions thanks to a bottle of Jumbo Gro.

What critic James Agee wrote about the Marx Brothers also applies to Avery in that even lesser Tex is better worth seeing than most other things I can think of. SYMPHONY IN SLANG (’51) is a succession of silly sight gags inspired by a hipster’s arrival at the Pearly Gates. He tells his life story to a befuddled Noah Webster, who pictures literal translations to such phrases as, “I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth,” “It was raining cats and dogs” and “I died laughing.”

SCREWBALL SQUIRREL features some great self-referential gags, such as the title character peeking ahead to the next scene to figure out what to do next. But the character was so obnoxious that he was actually killed off at the end of his fifth, and final, cartoon.

Avery’s influence is vast. When in THE LITTLE MERMAID (‘89), Sebastian’s jaw drops like an anvil when he spies Ariel nursing an injured Prince Eric, that’s a classic Tex Avery take. THE MASK (‘94) pays direct homage to RED HOT RIDING HOOD when Jim Carrey’s Mask man is undone by nightclub chanteuse Cameron Diaz. And the Tex Avery force is strong in Animaniacs’ helter-skelter pacing and fourth-wall breaking.

But there is nothing like the real thing. No one made cartoons that were loonier. The secret? As Avery told Joe Adamson, he didn’t think in terms of the age of his audience: “I tried to do something I thought I would laugh at if I were to see it on the screen.”

Ray Harryhausen: The Master of Movie Magic By Raquel Stecher

June 29th marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the late, great Ray Harryhausen. A master technician and visionary, Harryhausen transported audiences into worlds of fantasy and mythology through his stop-animation. What now takes a team, Harryhausen did mostly on his own. He was autonomous, preferring to have control over his work and his vision, and he became heavily involved in many aspects of filmmaking including writing, storyboarding, producing and in many cases co-directing. 

Harryhausen fully immersed himself in the process by analyzing the skeletal structure of ancient beasts, studying animals in motion, sketching models and building them by hand and then finding the most creative and dynamic ways to bring his fantastical creatures to life on screen. He poured so much of his time and energy into his models that he’d often develop emotional attachments to them. Harryhausen’s unique gifts as a visual effects artist improved on the work that came before him and would pave the way for future filmmakers to come. Among those who credit Harryhausen for inspiring their work include directors Tim Burton, James Cameron, Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson.

Harryhausen’s own source of inspiration came from the work of stop-animation artist Willis H. O’Brien who worked on the monster adventure classic KING KONG (’33). Watching KING KONG for the first time made an indelible mark on teenage Harryhausen. Inquisitive by nature, he set out to learn about how the film was made. Once he learned about stop-animation, he contacted O’Brien at MGM and made his acquaintance. O’Brien took Harryhausen under his wing and the mentorship would help him launch his future career. His parents were extraordinarily supportive of their teenage son. His father built a small studio in the corner of their garage and his mother would give him scraps of fabric and fur for modeling. Harryhausen’s father was particularly good at creating armament, the metal structure that helps the models move with manipulation, and would work with his adult son on many films.

What was unique about Harryhausen was his singular vision and ingenuity. It can be seen with the innovations he brought to many of his projects. Harryhausen worked with O’Brien on the film MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (’49), another monster adventure film that was born out of the continued success of KING KONG. Harryhausen worked for two years on the film, and while O’Brien was busy solving production problems, Harryhausen got to work on the animation. He studied footage of large gorillas from the Chicago Zoo and according to Harryhausen the film proved to be “most useful for studying the pace and stride of his walk as well as detailed idiosyncrasies.” The armature was based off the skeleton of a gorilla and Harryhausen used his skills to manipulate the model to give Joe Young more nuanced movement than Kong had before him.

MIGHTY JOE YOUNG led to work on other monster films like THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (’53), where Harryhausen used front-projection technique as a cost-saving measure, and IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA (’55). The latter film included a giant killer octopus that Harryhausen gave six tentacles instead of eight. Time meant money in Hollywood, something Harryhausen was keenly aware of, and it made sense to spend time animating fewer legs. Especially when the audience didn’t need to see all eight to get the full effect.

With UFOs being all the rage in the 1950s, Harryhausen used his unique brand of innovation to animate flying saucers for the science fiction film EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS (’56). He used an aerial brace that connected the saucer to metal wires. The brace allowed Harryhausen to tilt the saucers so they appeared to fly at an angle when necessary. The most difficult part of this project was depicting the saucers destroying buildings. In his book Film Fantasy Scrapbook Harryhausen wrote, “they had to be photographed in the process of disintegration by a death ray, frame by frame —each falling brick being suspended by invisible wires.”

Harryhausen found his calling when he transitioned to fantasy stories where mythical creatures are aplenty. Working alongside his longtime collaborator Charles Schneer, to ensure that THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD (’58) was a success they came up with a new name for Harryhausen’s work: Dynamation. Had the film been promoted as a live action film with animation, adult audiences might turn away thinking that it was for children. Dynamation rebranded the stop-animation to cast the widest net possible. In THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD Harryhausen animated a skeleton in a thrilling sword battle that would be revisited in just a few years on a bigger scale.

JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (’63) was the pinnacle of Harryhausen’s career. He called the film his favorite because it was “the most complete.” The skeleton fight sequence, which has since become the most iconic scenes of Harryhausen’s work, took four months to complete. Harryhausen insisted there be seven skeletons because of the importance the number seven had in mythology. However, this created more work. He created anatomically correct skeletons with movable heads, arms and legs. Stuntmen and actors rehearsed to get the action scenes just right and Harryhausen filmed the skeletons over a rear-projection of that footage matching the skeletons’ movements with that of the actors. The longest animated sequence in the film features Talos, a giant bronze statue that comes to life to seek revenge. Harryhausen was inspired by the myth of Talos and by the Colossus of Rhodes and created a gigantic version of Talos with movements “deliberately stiff and mechanical.”

Other innovations include the giant crab in MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (’61). Harryhausen bought a live crab from Harrods in London, had it humanely killed and replaced the meat with metal armature and reanimated the dead crab on screen. In CLASH OF THE TITANS (’81), he finally got his wish to create a more dynamic interpretation of Medusa. He specifically created a reptilian Medusa to avoid having to animate a human one with clothes. Animating Medusa was incredibly difficult as each of the twelve snakes on her head had to constantly be in motion. Harryhausen joked that the process gave him a “Gorgon-sized headache.”

While Harryhausen’s style of animation has now been replaced by more advanced stop motion techniques as well as CGI, his films continue to awe and inspire audiences. It’s still a thrill to see his many mythical and ancient creatures come to life in his films.