Tex Avery: The Mgm Years, 1942-1955
Walt Disney's animation strove to duplicate reality, but Tex Avery's steered clear of the limitations of lifelike action, and today's cartoons owe far more to Avery's over-the-top style than to Disney's staidness. Since his 1980 death, Avery has been getting his belated critical due, culminating in this lavish art book. Avery was instrumental in developing Bugs Bunny and the other Warner Brothers cartoon stars, but this retrospective focuses on his artistic pinnacle at MGM in the 1940s and 1950s. There, his vivid comic imagination flowered in maniacally paced masterpieces full of wild gags and zany characters. Welcomely light on text--though Canemaker's commentary is informed and insightful--the volume is loaded with well-reproduced animation cels, storyboards, and other artwork. So classy a tribute to an anarchic, rowdy artist like Avery may seem somehow inappropriate, but with producers of crude made-for-TV-cartoons like Hanna-Barbera getting coffee-table treatment these days, heck, Avery deserves a banquet-table tome.Gordon Flagg