“The Hollywood cartoon at its height provided an unparalleled production base of artists, writers, composers and technicians releasing one of the most complete articulations of visual imagination to hit the screen. In the mercilessly manic hands of Tex Avery, this film form was stretched and convoluted into anarchic assaults on mind, matter and morality....
“From 1941 to 1954 Avery enjoyed the directorial control of his own unit at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It is this period that saw his strongest and most original work and which has the spotlight of our tribute here....
“Avery gained such command of all the elements of animation design that many of his films probe and test the boundaries of the medium. His creatures run afoul of the sprocket-holes of the filmstrip through their travails, the audience rises up from the ‘thoid row' of the ‘theatre' in fatal involvements with the story, and characters rage in Brechtian quarrels over different endings for the cartoon.... But above all the formal strengths of his work, his cartoons share with the short films of Chaplin and the better scenes of the Marx Brothers in that his ideas are deeply, indelibly and enduringly FUNNY!” --Anthony Reveaux.
Included in tonight's program are:
Blitz Wolf (1942); Happy-Go-Nutty (1944); The Shooting of Dan McGoo (1945); Slap-Happy Lion (1947); The Cat That Hated People (1948); Ventriloquist Cat (1950); Symphony in Slang (1951); The Flea Circus (1954).