CARTOONS ARE NO LAUGHING MATTER

By RICHARD CORLISS

It was 1927, the year Hollywood discovered sound. Any actor who could talk, any playwright who could write talk, was worth hundreds of thousands. But the man who would revolutionize movies with a talking mouse was having a hard time raising the $18,000 for his first talking picture--a thing with a mouse. To get his Steamboat Willie sound track recorded on the equipment owned by a con artist named Pat Powers, Walt Disney agreed to let Powers distribute his cartoons. Mickey Mouse was an instant star, but Disney saw little cash from Powers. From this he learned to trust no one. Walt's invaluable animator, Ub Iwerks, learned less. Powers lured him away to make Flip the Frog cartoons, and Iwerks sold his 20% share in Disney for $2,920. Today that stock would be worth perhaps half a billion dollars.

Cartoons are cash cows, money mice, dollar ducks, beyond the dreams of Iwerks or even Walt. The Lion King earned $300 million at the domestic box office, more abroad, and zillions more in video. This summer's Disney feature, Hercules, looms huge: it might make Simba roar with envy; it will surely spur the rebels at DreamWorks, under the command of former Disney exec Jeffrey Katzenberg, to draw bigger and faster on their animation slate. On TV, The Simpsons, now in its eighth superb season, begot Ren and Beavis, Duckman and King of the Hill. Disney and Warner stores sell upmarket T shirts and gewgaws based on new and classic cartoons.

The mania has now produced a spate of books--catnip for the nostalgia connoisseur and the mogul hoping to extend his franchise line and move the vintage-cartoon cassettes off the video-store shelves. Warner Books has published Chuck Reducks, the second (after Chuck Amuck) memoir of Warner Bros.' cartoon glory years by its major double-domo, Chuck Jones. Turner Publishing, literary outlet for the owner of mgm cartoons, honors animation's wildest spirit with John Canemaker's handsome Tex Avery: The MGM Years, 1942-55. It is essentially a reprint of Pierre Lambert's original, one of four French books on Avery.

Hyperion, the Disney book subsidiary, could level all the trees in Snow White's forest for its nostalgia and tie-in tomes--not just the inevitable The Art of Hercules, due any day now, but fond, if incestuous, tributes to the anonymous heroes who toiled on Disney cartoons. Canemaker's Before the Animation Begins: The Art and Lives of Disney Inspirational Sketch Artists is a sumptuous introduction to the craftsfolk whose paintings suggested a mood and design for Disney directors. Hyperion has also begun a sketchbook series of drawings from its early works; the first is a beguiling Bambi. In concert these volumes illuminate the unseen artistry that helps create movie magic.

Now that animation has been recognized as art, it's time to remember that it has always been big business, bad business--Serious Business, to borrow the title of a helpful cartoon history by Stefan Kanfer, a former TIME film critic and senior editor. (The book is published by Scribner, which, oddly enough, has no cartoon division.) From the Jones, Canemaker and Kanfer works emerges a picture of the industry that might have been painted not by Disney but by Goya. It's compelling and instructive, and it ain't pretty.

The simple appeal of cartoons to studio bosses is that talent on both sides of the camera comes cheap. The "stars" work for free; they have no agents; they can't extort you for a sequel. And as The Simpsons' Matt Groening has said, "Animated characters don't get busted, and they don't get old." As for the animators, salaries are a little higher than when Jones joined Warner in 1933 for $18.50 a six-day week. But until DreamWorks entered the picture, creators of even the most boffo animated films got no royalties. George Lucas made zillions from the Star Wars rerelease; the three directors of the 1961 One Hundred and One Dalmatians got none of the hundreds of millions it made in reissues and on video.

Cartoon directors are kids at heart, and the Warner aces (Jones, Avery, Friz Freleng, Bob Clampett) were brilliant kids, all in their 20s or early 30s, when they created Porky, Daffy and Bugs. Freleng was the anchor, making crisp vaudeville comedies. Clampett bent his stories and pummeled his characters into manic, surreal, endless inventive farce; his great period (1942-46) deserves a book of its own. Jones' films were about people--all right, barnyard critters, but human withal--who endured life's vithithitudes (as Daffy would say) with amazing grace and Charlie Chaplin's physical wit.

Avery's mad movies were about movement--motion exploded into violent emotion. In Magical Maestro an illusionist transforms an opera singer into a ballerina, an Indian, a widdle boy, a Hawaiian war chanter. As a wolf spies Red Hot Riding Hood, his tongue springs out zigzaggy and his eyes pop out in sections like a dozen contact lenses. No director, of cartoons or live action, vacuum-packed his gags as tightly as Avery did.

The bosses of these geniuses were, for the most part, miserly dolts who never tested positive for a sense of humor. Fred Quimby, boss of the mgm staff, disliked Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera's first Tom 'n' Jerry cartoon so much he forbade them to make any other cat-and-mouse films--until exhibitors demanded more Tom 'n' Jerrys.

It was even weirder at Warner. Harry Warner, the studio's money czar, said he knew nothing about his cartoon unit except that "we make Mickey Mouse." Leon Schlesinger, the stingy despot who ran the unit until 1944, would begin his viewing of dailies with a curt "Roll the garbage." Schlesinger did inspire his troops once: his lisp was the basis for Daffy Duck's voice. Schlesinger's successor, Eddie Selzer, hated the notion that his slaves might enjoy their work. He once sputtered, "What the hell has all this laughter to do with the making of animated cartoons?"

The men in charge rarely knew the worth of these cartoons, artistically or financially. Even Walt, in his later years, was blinkered. The genius-boss, who in 1934 had dazzled his staff for four hours laying out his vision for Snow White, turned bitter and vindictive after a 1940 strike at the studio. Disney now coveted real estate; bored with putting fantasy kingdoms into films, he wanted to put one in Anaheim, Calif. And he thought so little of the cels (the precious units of any animated film) that he gave them away to visitors when Disneyland opened.

Unlike Walt, who refused to syndicate his films to TV, Jack Warner sold his pre-1948 cartoon library for a fire-sale $3,000 each; they have made much more than that in each year since then. Later, to make room for its record division's accounting files, the company trashed its archive of the cels used in its great cartoons; those cindered cels would now be worth tens of millions. Ub Iwerks wasn't the only financial rube in the business.

Kanfer writes with sweep and concision, but when he tries to graft U.S. political traumas onto cartoon fables (blaming the failure of the 1988 Land Before Time on its inability to harmonize with Reagan's happy talk), he can pretzel himself like an Avery wolf. Jones, incapable of writing a sentence that doesn't sing like Bugs in What's Opera, Doc?--joyous, impish and in perfect pitch--is fashioning, in his 85th year, a second career almost as wondrous as his first. May it make animation's favorite uncle rich, wealthy, or moderately well off.

And happier, at least, than Avery, who just before his death in 1980 was reduced to working as a Hanna-Barbera gag man, largely forgotten and afraid that he wasn't "funny anymore." Avery knew that the serious business of cartoon making had a Pagliacci side. If it didn't make you laugh like a kid on the first day of summer, it could pretty much break your heart.