Tex Avery: Screwball Classics, Volume 1 (Preview)
Reviewed by Darragh O’Donoghue

Produced by Fred Quimby; directed by Tex Avery; stories by Heck Allen, Jack Cosgriff, and Rich Hogan; animation by Ray Abrams, Preston Blair, Bob Cannon, Walt Clinton, Michael Lah, Ed Love, Louie Schmitt, Grant Simmons, and Irven Spence; editing and sound by Jim Faris and Fred McAlpin; music by Scott Bradley; featuring the voices of Tex Avery, Sara Berner, Billy Bletcher, John Brown, Daws Butler, Stan Freberg, Paul Frees, Frank Graham, Wally Maher, Dick Nelson, and Bill Thompson. Blu-ray, color, nineteen cartoons, with a total running time of 138 min., 1943–1951. A Warner Archive release.

“In a cartoon, you can do anything!” exclaims one of the self-aware and self-referential characters in this Blu-ray collection of nineteen shorts by Tex Avery, “one of the undisputed masters of animation,” according to historian Paul Wells (Understanding Animation, London: Routledge, 1996). The earliest film therein demonstrates what such a statement might mean. 

Dumb-Hounded (1943) is the first cartoon to feature Droopy. This lugubrious basset hound was Avery’s only successful attempt at MGM to fabricate an enduring cartoon character, having created or helped develop the immortal Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny (the Texan native supplied his “What’s up, doc?” catchphrase), and Daffy Duck, during six formative years at Warner Bros. before he fell out over creative and stipendiary differences with producer Leon Schlesinger in 1941.

In narrating the pursuit of an escaped convict wolf by police hound Droopy, Dumb-Hounded follows the usual pattern of these subverted chase scenarios—the energy-expending villain is consistently foiled by the impassive hero. Droopy is in many ways an anti-Tex Avery character, the still, laconic center in a world of sound, fury, and tale-telling idiots, an unflappable, undefeatable, omnipotent, omniscient near-divinity against whom a series of wildly inventive foes go mad as they fail to outwit him. Droopy is the epitome of conscience or the superego—there are many Freudian readings of Avery, who came to prominence as pop psychoanalysis began to dominate the American public sphere—checking the primal lusts for power, status, acquisition and, preeminently, sex, of his antagonists. Avery in such films reverses the ancient mode of deploying animal characters to explore unspoken or unspeakable human concerns—here animals as humans reveal their base animal instincts.

As with the later Tweety/Sylvester or Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote series by his former colleagues at Warners, the audience is more likely to identify with the hapless bullies rather than the nominal hero Droopy—their endless, ingenious striving for but frustration in failing to grasp an unattainable goal are universal human traits in a way that the one-dimensional perfection of Droopy could never be. Bad Luck Blackie (1949) takes this absurdist worldview to its illogical conclusion. It begins with a dog turning the torture of a cat into a spectacle for his amusement. In a narrative that pivots on superstition (seeing a black cat is bad luck), it is no surprise that the film ends with a metaphysical dimension—the dog becomes his own punisher and persecutor by swallowing a whistle that blows every time he hiccups. This is closer to the bleak, purgatorial ending of Fritz Lang’s “noir tragedy” Scarlet Street (1945) than anything in a major studio cartoon.

Such an insight would become increasingly pointed after World War II when success and acquisition were the watchwords of America as an emergent superpower. Like termites who keep crawling under the back door, Avery’s marginal, obsessive, priapic antiheroes are at once an ugly reflection of an acquisitive society and an affront to a social conformity that in these cartoons sees its repressions released in an exaggeratedly sexualized and militarized mise en scène, where even the innocent landscape or street furniture heaves with double entendre—an externalization of inner need. Postwar America remakes itself in the ideal image of sport, advertising, and Disney, the recurrent butts of Avery’s savage satire. Hence the anachronistic introduction of Depression-era antiheroes George and Junior (voiced by Avery himself) in Hound Hunters (1947). 

Derived from Steinbeck’s famous social fable Of Mice and Men (1937) and its 1939 film adaptation (as well as Laurel and Hardy, whose theme tune is often evoked in Avery’s cartoons), these vagrant bears are unwelcome, grating reminders of a recent past where indigence, failure, violence, pain, and marginality characterized the American way of life.

The body is the site of individual and social pressure in Avery films such as Dumb-Hounded. It is a hysterical body as formulated by Freud—fluid, permeable, vulnerable, uncontrollable, and prone to unwanted metamorphoses. Bodies stretch, contract, bend, squash, crack, smash, separate, and reconfigure, accelerate or decelerate, inadvertently dance, and take on the forms of objects hurled at them or inadvertently swallowed. Characters in frenetic movement are suddenly frozen into single images, those key frames whose animation normally defines the works as cartoons. Shadows—that essence of and yet proof against individual integrity—separate from bodies; individuals split, multiply, or fuse like cells. Visual puns conflate one entity into another. Bodies blur the lines between animal, human, object, and technology to create mercurial, malleable forms, updates of the Dada cyborg that emerged from the social and corporeal destruction of an earlier world war. 

Avery’s “inability” to create memorable characters at MGM actually pays off ethically and thematically in this context. Whereas Porky, Bugs, and Daffy, no matter who directed and animated their films, no matter what narrative mills they were run through, remained recognizably Porky, Bugs, and Daffy, Avery’s characters are irrevocably changed and traumatized by their experiences. Even the taciturn Droopy at the climactic moment of supreme victory has a spasm of uncharacteristic joy and libido, like a glitch in the machine, before returning to his customary sangfroid. 

Avery’s volatile bodies perform in volatile spaces, where the classical laws of physics are suspended or subverted. Interiors—from palatial mansions to jails to dog catcher trucks—are places of physical and psychical confinement, but they are rarely fixed. Hogarthian games with perspective, foreshortening, and scale disrupt any sense of space (the genuinely unsettling Who Killed Who? [1943] is a masterclass in this regard). The fact that these are drawn spaces is manipulated by self-conscious characters that can erase supervening prison bars, transform a tennis court into a swimming pool, or fool a pursuer by painting a road or passageway into a rock or wall. Terminal plunges from cliffs or skyscrapers can be reversed or diminished by the application of brakes. Whereas the bewildering profusion of signs and textual elements in Avery’s films paradoxically undermine meaning and authority, spiritual borders—between life and death, heaven and hell—are criss-crossed with ease. As is the boundary between the films’ temporally, spatially, and ontologically bound reality and that of the viewer…

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