A nice (though brief) summary of a man who revolutionized animation over a couple of decades starting in the mid-1930's, the legendary Tex Avery. Using gags and a style that markedly shifted away from family-oriented Disney fare, Avery played up exaggerated forms of physical mayhem and the libido in work that still holds up today, though it's occasional objectifying to women and hardly politically correct. I hesitate to say his cartoons were "violent" because despite the hitting or threat of violence between characters, it all seems so exaggerated and was usually followed shortly by the character getting up as if nothing had happened and scurrying off to the next gag. It does have a young adult feel to it though - even in the material excerpted here, there is whiskey drinking, wild male lust, and a suicide.
The characters Avery created included Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, and Droopy, and the documentary shows many of their earliest inceptions, which was a treat. He was highly influential to those who would carry on some of these characters, like Chuck Jones who worked for him and is among those interviewed here, and also animators much later, which is apparent in the artwork. Jones and others also provide a pretty decent psychological insight into Avery, though I confess I would have liked more time on his work, instead of things like his bathroom behavior.
The excerpts from the cartoons are simply brilliant, and include the wartime cartoon "Blitz Wolf," featuring a demonic wolf as Hitler, "Der Fewer (Der Better)," the overly horny wolf in "Red Hot Riding Hood" and "Little Rural Riding Hood," and "Bad Luck Blackie," which has a small cat enlisting the services of an alley cat from the "Black Cat Bad Luck Company" to help him with "dog trouble." The humor may seem juvenile and I guess a lot of it is, but there is also quite a bit of sophistication in the gags and their timing. I also loved seeing Avery playing with "alienation techniques" which had his characters making it explicit that they were on film, e.g. Crossing a "technicolor line" into an area of black and white, or running so fast around a corner as to skid off the edges of the film, or plucking what seemed to be a real hair stuck to the bottom of the film's frame. It's great stuff, and I just wish this documentary had been longer than 52 minutes.
