Monday, Aug. 08, 1994
Like the Mask?
By RICHARD CORLISS
Shy Stanley Ipkiss dons a mystical mask, and shazam! all cartoon hell breaks loose. His face goes green; his teeth grow as large as porcelain pillows. When he spots gorgeous Tina on a nightclub stage, his eyeballs pop like demented Slinkys, his anvil jaw drops onto the table, and his tongue cascades from his mouth; it's a red carpet for a red-hot princess to walk on. His heart thumps about a yard out of his chest. He lets howl a wolf whistle Jack Nicholson would envy and bashes himself with a huge mallet.
This scene from The Mask is a scream, all right. But no mere live-action film could boast the speed and grace of the 1943 cartoon that directly inspired it: Tex Avery's Red Hot Riding Hood. Catch it some night on cable's Cartoon Network. The Wolf enters a club called the Sunset Strip ("30 Gorgeous Girls -- No Cover"), and starts palpating when Red, in a scarlet bustier, sings Daddy. Wolfie goes bats: chairs fly, factory whistles blow, mechanical hands clap. And Red is worth every libidinal leer. With her Bette Davis voice, Betty Grable legs and Betty Boop bosom, she is any wolf's bedtime fantasy -- way too hot for the '40s, and plenty sulfurous even today.
Red Hot Riding Hood, which was also the source for Jessica Rabbit in the 1988 hit Who Framed Roger Rabbit, is vintage Avery -- a hilariously precise essay on the elemental impulses of desire, hunger, revenge and infantile mischief-making. It offers a smart introduction to a popular artist who used warp-speed motion to plumb dark emotions and who created some of film's most anarchic, surreal, fall-down-funny visions.
Avery (1907-80) had directed cartoons at Warner Bros., where he helped create Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, but he hit his stride at MGM. From 1942 to 1955 he made 65 short films there, 16 of them starring Droopy, a dyspeptic dog. Because most of his cartoons featured a generic menagerie, Avery was not so widely known as Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett, who did Bugs and Daffy star vehicles at Warners. (Four Avery Screwball Classics cassettes are available in video stores.) In France, however, he is an icon. French publishers have issued at least four lavish books on his oeuvre (just one exists in English, a spirited overview by Joe Adamson). In Paris and Cannes there are Studio Aventures stores peddling Avery T shirts, slippers, Red Hot Riding Hood flip books -- the works. His name has even been spelled out on the tiles of the hit game show La Roue de la Fortune.
Avery is worth the attention. His best cartoons inhabit a dog-eat-cat, male- chase-female, everyone-humiliate-everyone-else world -- a place at constant war over food crises and turf disputes. It is also a world wholly aware of itself as an artistic fabrication. A joke will apologize for itself by sprouting an ear of corn (Get it? Corny!). A character will pluck a vagrant "hair" from the film-projector lamp, or abruptly go monochrome because he passed a reading technicolor ends here. "Ain't we in the wrong picture?" asks Red Riding Hood of the wolf in Swing Shift Cinderella. By keying the insane pace, wild exaggeration, mock-cheerful tone and inside references that today define so much of movie and TV entertainment, Avery practically invented pop culture's Postmodernism.
The director -- a roly-poly guy who resembled the cop (far right) in Who Killed Who? -- could make movies that were cute and fun. Avery created sweet, but crazy, Disney-style elves in the charmfest The Peachy Cobbler. The perennially rejected skunk star of the delightful Little 'Tinker is wondrously resilient, pouting for a millisecond before leaping for joy in anticipation of his next true love. An Avery hero had to have a heart, if only so it could be broken. Also spindled, mutilated, detonated -- or bursting bomblike out of his chest, for all the world to see.