Tex Avery
Frederick Bean "Tex" Avery was an American animator and voice actor. He was known for directing and producing animated cartoons during the golden age of American animation. His most significant work was for the Warner Bros. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, where he was crucial in the creation and evolution of famous animated characters such as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd for Warner Bros. and Droopy, Butch Dog, Screwy Squirrel, The Wolf, Red Hot Riding Hood, and George and Junior for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
He gained influence for his technical innovation, directorial style, and brand of humor that appealed especially towards adults. Avery's attitude toward animation was opposite that of Walt Disney and other conventional family cartoons at the time. Avery's cartoons were known for their essentially darker, sarcastic, ironic, absurdist, irreverent, and sometimes sexual tone in nature. They focused on visual gags, meta humor, physically impossible gags, social satire, surrealist humor, rapid pacing, racial stereotypes, and violent slapstick occurring around brash, outlandish characters who broke the fourth wall, stating that cartoons are meant to do anything.
Early life and education
Avery was born to Mary Augusta "Jessie" and George Walton Avery in Taylor, Texas. His father was born in Alabama and his mother was born in Chickasaw County, Mississippi.Avery graduated in 1926 from North Dallas High School. A popular catchphrase at his school was "What's up, doc?", which he later used for Bugs Bunny in the 1940s. Interested in becoming a newspaper cartoonist, he took a three-month summer course at the Chicago Art Institute but left after a month.
Tex Avery's major inspirations were comedians such as Laurel & Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and especially The Marx Brothers; the latter of which was inspiration for Bugs Bunny. He was especially inspired by Winsor McCay, Pat Sullivan, Otto Messmer, Max Fleischer and Walt Disney in terms of animation field. He additionally liked the works of newspaper comic strip artist Virgil Partch, mainly praising for his surrealist gags.
Animation career
On January 1, 1928, Avery arrived in Los Angeles. He spent the next few months working in menial jobs. According to animation historian Michael Barrier, these jobs included working in a warehouse, working on the docks at night, loading fruits and vegetables, and painting cars. He began his animation career when hired by the Winkler studio. He was an inker, inking cels for animated short films in the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit series; the character had been created by Walt Disney. Avery then moved to a new studio, Universal Cartoon Studios. He was again employed as an inker, but moved rapidly up the studio's hierarchy. By 1930, Avery had been promoted to the position of animator.Avery continued working at the Walter Lantz Studio into the early 1930s. He worked on most of the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons from 1931 to 1935. He is shown as "animator" on the original title card credits on the Oswald cartoons. He later claimed to have directed two cartoons during this time.
Accident to eye
During some office horseplay at the Lantz studio, a thumbtack or paper clip flew into Avery's left eye and caused him to lose sight in that eye. Some speculate it was his lack of depth perception that gave him his unique look at animation and bizarre directorial style, but it did not stop his creative career. The incident is described in some detail by Barrier, based in part on old interviews with Avery. Part of the typical crude horseplay at the Universal studio was using a rubber band or a paper spitball to target the back of a colleague's head. An animator called Charles Hastings decided to take the game one step further, by using a wire paper clip, instead. Avery heard one of his colleagues telling him to look out. He reacted by turning around. Instead of the back of his head, the paper clip hit Avery in his left eye. He instantly lost the use of his eye.From inker to storyboards
As an animator, Avery worked under director Bill Nolan. Nolan reportedly delegated work to Avery, whenever Avery had to animate a sequence. Nolan's instructions for a scene involving Oswald being chased by bees were reportedly simple. He would describe in which direction Oswald was running and for how many feet. The rest of the details were left up to Avery. Avery started handing out work to other animators working under Nolan.Avery wanted still greater control over the creative process and served as a de facto director for a couple of films. Based on Avery's recollections, here is a description of how this happened. He was submitting sight gags for use in the short films. Some of them were used in the actual films, and some funny ones were left out. He wanted to somehow get all his gags in the finished film. So, he asked Nolan to let him create the entire storyboard for a film. Nolan instructed Avery to not only draw the storyboard, but also to work on the timing and the layout on his own. Avery completed two films using this process. An older Avery recalled that both films "were terrible", though they got accepted for release.
Avery was reportedly displeased with his salary and had started giving up on his work. After about six weeks of substandard work, his superiors let him go. In April 1935, Avery lost his job at the Universal studio.
"Termite Terrace"
Later in 1935, Avery applied for a job at Leon Schlesinger Productions. Avery reportedly managed to convince producer Leon Schlesinger that he was an experienced director, a false claim. In Avery's own words:By 1935, when Avery was hired, the Schlesinger studio had only two full-time, regular film directors: Friz Freleng and Jack King. Avery became the third regular director. The staff of the Schlesinger studio had become too large to be housed in a single building at the Warner Bros. backlot on Sunset Boulevard. The new Avery unit of the studio was granted their own building, a five-room bungalow. The unit staff dubbed their quarters "Termite Terrace", due to its significant termite population. "Termite Terrace" later became the nickname for the entire Schlesinger/Warner Bros. studio, primarily because Avery and his unit were the ones who defined what became known as "the Warner Bros. cartoon".
Avery was granted exclusive use of four animators: Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, Sid Sutherland, and Virgil Ross. The first animated short film produced by this unit was Gold Diggers of '49, the third Looney Tunes film starring Beans. Beans was also featured in the film's title card, signifying that he was the intended protagonist. The film had a Western setting and cast Beans as a gold miner. Also featured in the film was a redesigned Porky Pig, making his second appearance. The Avery unit was assigned to work primarily on the black-and-white Looney Tunes instead of the Technicolor Merrie Melodies, but was allowed to make color Merrie Melodies beginning with Page Miss Glory from 1936. Avery was also noted to be the first to stray away from using song breaks in color cartoons starting with the 1937 short Uncle Tom's Bungalow, later saying that "We were forced to use a song, which would just ruin the cartoon. You'd try like a fool to get funny, but it was seldom you did."
Avery stopped using Beans following Gold Diggers of '49, but continued using Porky as a star character. According to Michael Barrier, Beans was more of a straight man. However, Porky had to be redesigned again. The early Porky was decidedly "piglike" in appearance. In Michael Barrier's description, Porky was very fat, had small eyes, a large snout, and pronounced jowls. He was like a porcine version of Roscoe Arbuckle. Starting with Porky the Rainmaker, his fourth animated short starring Porky, Avery introduced a cuter version of Porky. The new design gave Porky more prominent eyes and a smaller snout. The jowls were replaced by chubby cheeks. Porky's body now had a rounder shape; its defining trait was not fatness, but softness. Barrier notes that the new design by Avery departed from the "Disneyish" realism in the previous drawing style. Porky became a less realistic pig and looked more like a cartoon character.
According to Martha Sigall, Avery was one of the few directors to visit the ink and paint department — where he would answer questions and was always in good humor — as he liked to see how his cartoons were developing. When some of the artists humorously criticized the wild action in his animated shorts, Avery would take time to explain his rationale. He recalled that while working at Warner Bros., the animators had a great deal of liberty, and were subject to very little censorship.
Creation of Looney Tunes stars
Avery, with the assistance of Clampett, Jones, and the new associate director Frank Tashlin, laid the foundation for a style of animation that rivaled The Walt Disney Studio as the leader in animated short films, and created a group of cartoon characters that are still known today. Avery, in particular, was deeply involved. He crafted gags for the shorts, and sometimes provided voices for them and held such control over the timing of the shorts that he would add or cut frames out of the final negative if he felt a gag's timing was not quite right.Porky's Duck Hunt introduced the character of Daffy Duck, who possessed a new form of "lunacy" and zaniness that had not been seen before in animated cartoons. Daffy was an almost completely crazy "darn fool duck" who frequently bounced around the film frame in double-speed, screaming "Hoo-hoo!" in a high-pitched, sped-up voice provided by voice artist Mel Blanc, who, with this cartoon, also took over providing the voice of Porky Pig. Avery directed two more Daffy Duck cartoons: Daffy Duck & Egghead and Daffy Duck in Hollywood. Egghead was a character inspired by comedian Joe Penner and first appeared in Avery's Egghead Rides Again.
Little Red Walking Hood first introduced the early character of Elmer Fudd as a character mostly taking part of some running gag. Elmer in this early form had green clothes, a brown bowler hat, and a pink nose. He was also named "Elmer" on the lobby cards for "The Isle of Pingo Pongo", his second appearance, Cinderella Meets Fella, his third appearance, and was fully called "Elmer Fudd" on screen in "A Feud There Was", also his fourth appearance. Elmer even appears on early merchandise and in the early Looney Tunes books in 1938 and 1939 and was later promoted as "Egghead's Brother" on the Vitaphone Release Sheet for Cinderella Meets Fella because Elmer was also voiced by Danny Webb in his Joe Penner voice that was also use for Egghead.
Ben Hardaway, Cal Dalton, and Chuck Jones directed a series of shorts that featured a Daffy Duck-like rabbit, created by Ben "Bugs" Hardaway. As is the case with most directors, each puts his own personal stamp on the characters, stories, and overall feel of a short. So, each of these cartoons treated the rabbit differently. The next to try out the rabbit, known around Termite Terrace as "Bugs' bunny", was Avery. Since the recycling of storylines among the directors was commonplace, A Wild Hare was a double throwback. Avery had directed the short Porky's Duck Hunt featuring Porky Pig, which also introduced Daffy Duck.
Hardaway remade it as Porky's Hare Hunt, introducing the rabbit. So, Avery went back to the "hunter and prey" framework, incorporating Jones's Elmer's Candid Camera gag for gag and altering the new design of Elmer Fudd, polishing the timing, and expanding the Groucho Marx smart-aleck attitude already present in Porky's Hare Hunt; he made Bugs a kind of slick Brooklynesque rabbit who was always in control of the situation. Avery has stated that it was very common to refer to folks in Texas as "doc", much like "pal", "dude", or "bud". In A Wild Hare, Bugs adopts this colloquialism when he casually walks up to Elmer, who is "hunting wabbits" and while carefully inspecting a rabbit hole, shotgun in hand, the first words out of Bugs's mouth is a coolly calm, "What's up, doc?" Audiences reacted riotously to the juxtaposition of Bugs's nonchalance and the potentially dangerous situation. "What's up, doc?" instantly became the rabbit's catchphrase. Originally, Avery wanted Bugs Bunny to be called Jack E. Rabbit because he hunted for jack rabbits when he was a kid. Numerous suggestions for names came up, but publicist Rose Horsely liked the name that was on Thorson's model sheet, saying that it was cute and they will "play it two ways." Avery argued on his stance for the name "Jack E. Rabbit" saying that "Mine's a rabbit! A tall, lanky, mean rabbit. He isn't a fuzzy little bunny." He also said the name Bugs Bunny sounded like a Disney character. Nevertheless, Schlesinger settled on Bugs Bunny.
Avery ended up directing only four Bugs Bunny cartoons: A Wild Hare, Tortoise Beats Hare, The Heckling Hare, and All This and Rabbit Stew. During this period, he also directed a number of one-shot shorts, including travelogue parody ; fractured fairy-tales ; Hollywood caricature films ; and cartoons featuring Bugs Bunny clones.
Avery's tenure at the Schlesinger studio ended in late 1941 when the producer and he quarreled over the ending to The Heckling Hare. In Avery's original version, Bugs and the hunting dog were to fall off a cliff three times, making it an early example of the wild take. According to a DVD commentary for the cartoon, historian and animator Greg Ford explained that the problem Schlesinger had with the ending was that, just before falling off the third time, Bugs and the dog were to turn to the screen, with Bugs saying, "Hold on to your hats, folks, here we go again!", a punchline to a potentially risqué joke of the day. However, Barrier uncovered a typewritten dialogue transcript of the cartoon that mentions the three falls at the end, but the "Hold on to your hats" line is absent, with the rest of the dialogue in the cartoon transcribed accurately. This inferred that Avery either misremembered or embellished the story and Schlesinger made the cut not because of any risqué content, but because he did not think that it was funny that Avery was killing Bugs three times, and the ending simply dragged on for too long. The Hollywood Reporter reported on the quarrel on July 2, 1941. Avery was slapped with a four-week, unpaid suspension.