Tex Avery: A Unique Legacy

Tex Avery:

A Unique Legacy

(1942–1955)

To my parents.

Tex Avery:

A Unique Legacy

(1942–1955)

Floriane Place-Verghnes

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Tex Avery: A Unique Legacy (1942–1955)

A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 0 86196 659 7 (Paperback)

Ebook edition ISBN: 9780-86196-919-7

Ebook edition published by

John Libbey Publishing Ltd, 3 Leicester Road, New Barnet, Herts EN5 5EW, United Kingdom

e-mail: john.libbey@orange.fr; web site: www.johnlibbey.com

Printed and electronic book orders (Worldwide): Indiana University Press,

Herman B Wells Library – 350, 1320E. 10th St., Bloomington, IN 47405, USA www.iupress.indiana.edu

© 2016 Copyright John Libbey Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved.

Unauthorised duplication contravenes applicable laws.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

SECTION 1  –  A FOREWORD ON THE GENERIC CONTEXT

Chapter I     The Cartoon-Making Technique

1.  The Story-Board

2.  The Model-Sheet

3.  The Lay-Out

4.  Soudtrack/Offstage

5.  Animation

6.  The Colouring, the Scenery, and the Shooting

Chapter II     The Cartoon Before Tex

1.  Early Animation

2.  Winsor McCay (1869–1934), Father of the Cartoon

3.  Raoul Barré (1874–1932)

4.  Max (1883–1972) and Dave (1894–1979) Fleisher

5.  Pat Sullivan (1887–1933) and Otto Messmer (1892–1983)

6.  Walt Disney (1901–1966) and Ub Iwerks (1901–1971)

7.  Tex Avery (1908–1980) and His Associates: A Cultural Nexus

SECTION 2  –  THE UNIQUENESS OF TEX AVERY’S TESTIMONY

Chapter III     Tex Avery’s Americanness: An Attempt to Retrieve the Past

1.  A Hymn to the American Language

2.  Chauvinism: Eulogy or Satire?

3.  Racism, or When Tex Supersedes Avery

Chapter IV     Facing Contemporary Politics

1.  The Psychological Consequences of History

2.  The Second World War and Propaganda

3.  The Postwar Greed for Money

Chapter V     Tex Avery’s Unique Viewpoint on Good, Evil, and Morality

1.  Violence

2.  Survival

3.  Tex Avery vs. Walt Disney: An Axiological Theme

SECTION 3  –  ON SEX AND GENDER

Chapter VI     Freudian Pansexualism: Concepts of Activity/Passivity

1.  Sexual Urges: A Definition of Male Normal Behaviour

2.  Shaping Female Identity or Hollywood’s Guilt

Chapter VII     Reduction of Womanhood Into Two Types: The Destructive Power of Women

1.  The Sex Symbol

2.  The Anti-Sex Symbol

3.  Male Supremacy

Chapter VIII     Oedipal Relationships and Their Consequences

1.  Disparaging the Mother

2.  Equating the Lover and the Father Figures

3.  Flawed Relationships

SECTION 4  –  TEX AVERY’S UNIQUE COMIC STRATEGIES

Chapter IX     The Burlesque Heritage

1.  Caricature

2.  Excess: The Marx Brothers Syndrome

3.  A Frantic Rhythm

4.  A Pattern of Mannerism

Chapter X     Towards a Pragmatic Relation With the Audience

1.  Structuring a Gag: Circularity and Analepses

2.  A Process of Mise en Abyme

Chapter XI     The Provisional Nature of the Averyan Universe

1.  Cosmos Lost

2.  The Logic of the Absurd

Conclusion

Filmography – Tex Avery’s Cartoons: The MGM Years (1942–1955)

Bibliography/Further reading

Acknowledgements

The first thanks should go to my brothers Alban and Flavien for leading me astray onto the path of lazy Sunday mornings spent watching cartoons instead of doing academic work. I would not have acquired such a knowledge of the subject had they not insisted I appreciate these pure jewels of hilarity in their company.

I would also like to thank Alain Suberchicot for providing constructive critiques of my work within an extraordinary short amount of time, or simply for being an excellent supervisor, this book being an extended – and I hope improved – version of my Master’s thesis.

I am grateful to the whole armada of people who not only believed in me (my publisher, John Libbey, whose trust, kindness and patience kept astonishing me), but also proved incredibly helpful throughout the research process: Pierre Floquet and Robin Allan for their intelligent suggestions, Alister Robson for showing me how to use tricky editing machines, Heather Fenwick for providing general help in an extraordinarily sane way, Patrick Brion and Manuel Alvarado for guiding me onto the slippery path of copyright permissions, Alexandra Cappigny and Emilie Boucheteil for running to various libraries when I was either too busy or too forgetful to do so. Last but not least, I am deeply indebted to those who took the pain of carefully re-reading and correcting my frequently approximate English: Catherine Rooney and James Waine. Extra special thanks to Eleanor Chuck, who not only proofread this book three times, an unbeaten record, but could easily have earned a place on the front cover as main editor.

I reserve a particular sentiment for Warner Brothers Inc., without whom and their point-blank refusal to grant copyright authorisation, this volume would have contained multiple images from Tex Avery and others’ cartoons in support of the textual content.

Introduction

Throughout my long career in the cartoon industry, I have created a humorous universe whose richness is dazzling. But my congenital modesty forbids me to allude here to these pure jewels of hilarity.

Tex Avery (1908–1980)

When I decided to choose Tex Avery as the subject of my research, those who thought I would fail to achieve my goal were numerous, not to mention those who did not take me seriously at all. At any rate, I do not think I have met more than ten people who did not smirk at such a challenge. My supervisor, Alain Suberchicot was one of them and I wish to thank him warmly for trusting me from the start without questioning my aims. For Tex Avery has this curious effect upon people, just like many other cartoonists. Cartoons are for children . How many times have I heard this biased statement? First and foremost, I defy anyone with a touch of common sense to put a five-year old in front of a cartoon by Tex Avery, unless they want to show him the crude realities of life. However, it is true that the invasion of cartoons on television, broadcast mainly during the week-end and on Wednesday afternoons, has largely contributed to endow them with a certain quality mostly associated with childish naïveté. Secondly, I also believe that many an adult has lost this childish capacity to wonder – and even to laugh.

Above all, we are too apt too ignore the childish element, so to speak, latent in most of our joyful emotions ... Indeed, it seems possible that, after a certain age, we become impervious to all fresh or novel forms of joy, and the sweetest pleasures of the middle-aged man are perhaps nothing more than a revival of the sensations of childhood.¹

As most adults look down upon cartoons from the aloofness of maturity, cartoon studies have generally been regarded as worthless; and consequently, critical approaches to Tex Avery’s works are scarce. Although this last decade has seen the multiplication of hard-back books containing more illustrations than text (the said text usually consisting of a few biographical elements merged with a detailed synopsis of each cartoon), critical studies are still drastically lacking. In other words, while the bibliography of books on cartoons aimed at collectors is vast, it proves very deficient for a more academic audience. However, the field of research dedicated to Tex Avery is not totally bare: Robert Benayoun’s various articles provide a deep insight into the cartoonist’s art and Sylvie Voyzé-Valayre’s study on the Averyan women has launched an academic interest in his work. To my knowledge, the most comprehensive critical study so far is a doctorate thesis by Pierre Floquet (unpublished at the time of printing).

Tex Avery’s characters have known a new lease of life since 1980, the year of their creator’s death, notably by being associated with by-products or by being used in commercials (cf. the French Père Dodu advert using the wolf and the girl to sell chicken nuggets and the like). Just as so many geniuses whose fame came posthumously, Tex Avery was in his lifetime utterly unknown overseas, but for a small group of French intellectuals, from which the already mentioned Robert Benayoun, editor of the cinematography magazine Positif, without whom French people would probably still be as ignorant as the rest as the world as regards Tex Avery. Also to be noted is Patrick Brion’s daring attempt in programming a couple of Tex Avery’s cartoons in addition to an old movie (in a weekly programme called La Dernière séance), thus enabling a whole generation to (re)discover cartoons that would otherwise have rotted away in some shabby basement. Consequently, and as strange as it may seem, apart from Americans, French, and Belgians, few people appear to be familiar with the complete works of Tex Avery (although certain characters – such as Droopy – have gained a world-wide popularity). This explains why a good half of the bibliography is in French, and quotations therefore translated by me.²

Another element which explains this lack of recognition is that the cartoon industry has always been considered as a secondary genre; a sub-class of the movie industry. This has probably been generated by the amalgamation of the two genres which has occurred since the birth of the movie industry; an amalgamation rendered easier by the fact they both use the same medium of communication (i.e. the screen) and also because, in the 1950s, movie companies would frequently promote special offers of the buy one film, get a cartoon free type, thus conferring a status of film preview on them. So whilst being two very different types of films (the terminology is quite relevant in this respect, since cartoons used to be called animated films, or even short films), they have constantly been set in parallel, cartoons acting as foils to films. In this light, it is quite easy to understand the feeling of frustration and uselessness that most cartoonists must have experienced. Tex Avery has been, all his life, a frustrated live-action director, and he would have been an absolutely great one.³ But paradoxically, the ostracism demonstrated towards cartoon directors (for instance, they were not allowed to join the same trade-unions as film-directors) also enabled them to move more freely within the realm of imagination, thus producing a certain number of masterpieces in terms of creativity. Walt Disney’s determined statement takes a deeper meaning under such a light.

I had an absolute and blind trust in this medium called animation; I was determined to prove to the sceptics that cartoons deserved a better place, that they were more than a mere stopgap in a programme, that they were more than a novelty; that they could be one of the best tools to give vent to imagination ever invented.

If Tex Avery was radically different from Walt Disney in his treatment of moral ideals – among other things – he did however share this enlightening belief that cartoons should try to achieve something different, this being rendered easier by the unique type of messages that they convey. As one of his animators in the later 1930s (at Warner Bros.), I was as ignorant of his genius as I suppose Michelangelo’s apprentices were oblivious to the fact that they, too, were working with a genius.⁴ Tex Avery’s cartoons are indeed the living and unique accounts of a past era, a quality that many critics have not acknowledged, considering him to be nothing more than a common gagman. Tex himself did not think of himself as endowed with a particular power. In Heck Allen’s words, Tex never understood the quality and extent of his own genius ... He doesn’t understand to this day that he has been a force in the animated cartoon business.

His uniqueness, his originality lies in an intensive display of madness (I shall nevertheless deal with various other aspects of his incredibly rich corpus); a madness which finds its roots in the liberation of a creative soul from the bonds of reason. I have therefore deliberately chosen to limit my analysis to the years he spent at the MGM studios as a director – and not simply an animator – because the cartoons he produced there between 1942 and 1955 are tremendously stamped with his influence and can easily be set apart from other cartoons by his contemporaries insofar as "even when the simplest, most predictable gag is being played, comic delirium is rampant in the treatment".⁵ The treatment of the various elements contained in a cartoon is indeed what gives it its uniqueness and this is the particular path I shall pursue in this book.

It could be argued that dealing with the subject pervaded with delirium in a reasonable way would not only be almost impossible, but that it would also destroy the original message. It is difficult or to be profound, analytical, or discerning about the art of Tex Avery, because profundity tends to interrupt laughter.⁶ However, Tex Avery’s corpus is so incredibly rich in concepts that even for the sake of laughter, it would be a waste not to grant him the right of a true, intellectual analysis. By dealing with a totally non-serious subject in a more or less serious way, I hope mainly to help reinstate Tex Avery to the place he has been denied for so long and to which he belongs: the Arcadia of comic artists with a touch of genuine poetic sensibility coupled with an ability to witness and give an account of the world they live in.

As a result, my study of Tex Avery’s cartoons will be centred principally around the uniqueness of his testimony (a key notion in Shoshana Felman’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History), testimony being understood as a synonym for historical account. In other words, I will concentrate on Tex Avery’s ability to depict both the American attempt to retrieve the past nostalgically, and to catch the Zeitgeist of 1940s America (through a historical analysis of the consequences of the Great Depression and the postwar period) which will lead the reader to face up to the questions of violence and survival ; or more generally, of good, evil, and morality in a world deprived of its previous landmarks.

A second point also related to the testimonial function of the cartoon, but which deserves a separate section because of its intricacy, is the question of sex and gender. The Averyan corpus is pervaded with sexual innuendoes; and to obliterate their roles through a prudish study would be to miss the plurality of the codes ... [and thus] censor the work of the discourse⁷ – as well as the artist’s work, which Tex Avery certainly does not need. I shall first define the Freudian concepts of activity and passivity as – respectively – male and female characteristics, and explain in which way the media industry, and Hollywood in particular, has played a crucial role in reshaping the image of womanhood and in reducing it to a bipolar opposition. I shall then proceed to examine Oedipal relationships in Tex Avery’s cartoons as subsequent and direct expressions of Hollywood’s manipulation.

However, one must bear in mind that Tex Avery’s cartoons were above all intended to be comic. I shall therefore devote the last section of this book to the comic strategies used by the cartoonist, starting from the burlesque devices he had inherited from the Marx brothers and Charlie Chaplin (among others), and showing how he instigated his conventions by transcending those of the burlesque artists. This shall lead the reader towards the curious and surprising Averyan world in which the main convention is precisely to be unconventional, which in the end endows the entire corpus with a certain poetic and oneiric (of dreams) quality.

Before embarking on a thematic analysis, it is necessary for the reader to get a better insight into the generic context, that is to say the cartoon-making technique and its brief history, to which I shall refer frequently in the subsequent sections.

Notes

1 Henri Bergson. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, transl. by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (London: Macmillan, 1935), p. 68.

2 When possible, I have attempted to find English versions of the quotations contained in this book. However, this was not always the case. When the footnote refers to a French source, the translation is mine. A limited number of quotes may have undergone a double translation (from English to French to English). I hope that the reader will forgive me for this lack of accuracy and that the said quotations will nevertheless keep their original meaning.

3 Heck Allen, quoted in Joe Adamson’s Tex Avery: King of Cartoons (New York: Da Capo Press, 1987), p. 148.

4 Chuck Jones. Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989), p. 97.

5 Joe Adamson. Tex Avery: King of Cartoons, Op. cit., p. 111. Emphasis mine. The source of all Joe Adamson quotations is this work, unless otherwise specified.

6 Chuck Jones. Op. cit., p. 97.

7 Roland Barthes. S/Z, transl. by Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 77.

SECTION 1 –

A Foreword On the Generic Context

Chapter I

The Cartoon-Making Technique

Provided that you have seen a few cartoons and you are rather curious, you must have wondered How did they do that? The magic atmosphere that pervades cartoons actually conceals a more practical side; that of the various techniques employed in order to achieve a maximum impact on the audience by constantly flirting with reality, without anyone noticing the amount of pain taken in timing the whole thing precisely. Five weeks of intense work, 8,640 frames and no less than 1,300 metres of film are required to create a six-minute cartoon. Cartoons in the 1940s had to be six minutes long, not more, not less, both for obvious financial reasons and because of their status of film preview: the duration of a cartoon, a set of commercials, a newsreel, and a film had to be precisely two hours long.

I now propose to follow the birth of a cartoon from its conception to the final result, by examining all the different departments that deal with its creation.

1.  The story-board

The very first thing you need to make a cartoon is obviously a screenplay. The script-writer (or storyman) is therefore the first person to put his shoulder to the wheel. Not only does he write the dialogue (unless a dialogue-man is appointed for this part of the process), but he is also responsible for the whole atmosphere of the cartoon through his detailed description of the characters, places, and forces at work in the story. He then works closely with the director to produce characters and situations that will work together visually. His role will be to translate the story in a limited number of sketches (from 50 and 150 for a six-minute cartoon), and to pair it with a few lines of dialogue, in order to see if the combination is effective. The drawings are very rough, not refined, and only depict extreme positions, behaviours, or physical expressions. Extreme, because knowing that a character, object, or landscape will gradually change (at a rhythm of 24 frames per second) between a period X and a period Y, the story-artist will not take the time (or the financial risk) to draw all the pictures between X and Y, but will merely sketch out the two extremes X and Y. The resulting story-board, which looks like a huge comic-strip, will then be pinned onto a cork panel so that the whole team (animators, model-makers, scene painters, etc.) can discuss potential modifications. The technique of the story-board has been used since the 1920s, but was significantly developed by Walt Disney.

2.  The model-sheet

Attitude is everything.⁸

Chuck Jones

You must feel the characters from inside out. You have to get attitudes that express the character.

Roger Allers, storyboard artist at Disney’s

In other words, since each character has his own way of running, walking, bouncing, etc., his personality must come first, long before pictorial representation. Some cartoonists working on animal characters concentrate on comparative anatomy (i.e. analysis of the similarities rather than the differences between animals and human beings) in order to understand movement. Such a study proves very helpful if you wish to retain the animal characteristics of a protagonist. However, for the same reason that he rejected three-dimensional drawing, Tex Avery was not particularly interested in comparative anatomy; this reveals another side of the problem. Since Droopy could not possibly be a normal dog, Tex Avery had to discover his own dynamics. "No, Bugs Bunny does not exist. But he lives."⁹ This is why the director and his main, or chief, animators need to study the characterisation of the protagonists before drawing a large and detailed range of physical characteristics and facial expressions for each of them (anger, madness, joy, sadness, etc.). The model-sheet thus produced will serve as a landmark for further animation, just like the plan of an essay. Each time an artist is unsure of what he is doing, he must refer to the model-sheet. A similar device exists for the plot. The outline describes the plot sequence after sequence, thus preventing the artists from drifting away from the original idea. Such devices are absolutely essential, since you have to bear in mind that when watching a cartoon by Tex Avery, you are actually watching a cartoon produced by a whole team. In other words, Droopy or the wolf are not the product of one man, but of several artists who had to work with the same character, so that no difference could be seen between one drawing and the next. The purpose of the model-sheet is to remind the team precisely of what the character should look like throughout the cartoon. Given that the model-sheet would prove much easier an enterprise if the protagonists were human, one may wonder what the point is of using an animal character at all. As with other fabulists, such as Æsop or La Fontaine, Tex Avery used animals to highlight human moral qualities, because staging real people would have proved too risky an experiment in the eyes of the censorship authority (as we shall see in the section dedicated to sex and gender). Besides, if in a cartoon