100 Greatest Animated Shorts / Red Hot Riding Hood / Tex Avery
USA / 1943
As Walt Disney’s animated features achieved success in the early 1940s, they were being pushed aside in the market for theatrical shorts by Warner Bros, who were making some of the funniest cartoons ever made and creating some of the history’s greatest cartoon characters, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, Speedy Gonzales, Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner.
In 1935, as Porky Pig made his debut for Warners, producer Leon Schlesinger teamed a new young animation director called Fred “Tex” Avery with animators Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, and Robert “Bobe” Cannon, moved them away from the main team and installed them in a cabin that they nicknamed “Termite Terrace”. Something special started to happen with the animation produced by the team and within a few years “Termite Terrace” became the nickname for the entire Warners studio because the shorts made there defined the Warner Bros’ cartoons.
Tex Avery and his team were striking back against Disney’s new realism, reinventing animation by taking the developments that had been made in character animation and pushing them to the limits with a zany exaggerated and extreme style. A total perfectionist, Avery was constantly creating gags for the shorts, sometimes even providing voices for them (including his trademark belly laugh) and even splicing frames out of the final negative if he felt a gag’s timing was not quite right. This level of control lead to problems and Avery resigned from Warner Bros in 1941 after he and Schlesinger quarreled when the producer changed the ending to the fifth Bugs Bunny cartoon The Heckling Hare.
In 1942, Avery joined MGM under Fred Quimby. Here he was given larger budgets, he was given ex-Disney artists such as Preston Blair and Ed Love to work with and his creativity was allowed free reign. Red Hot Riding Hood is the first of Tex Avery’s Red Riding Hood films and proved to be one of MGM’s most successful cartoons to date. Avery’s style of wildly pushing the gags beyond their limits and into areas of the surreal had a big effect at MGM and on the cartoon world in general.
Red Hot Riding Hood starts off as the traditional fairy tale, but Avery’s typically self-aware characters rebel and demand the cartoon does something different for a change. The story restarts with the wolf, a regular Avery character, as a city slicker in a nightclub being driven to distraction in extreme style by Red Riding Hood as a sexy showgirl. He snaps into stiff erect forms and his eyes pop out of his head as she does her cabaret routine and after she spurns his vulgar advances he pursues her to Granny’s penthouse apartment, where the reality is turned upside down again as randy granny energetically pursues the wolf in extreme cartoon chase style. Anticipating Madonna’s lusty old lady routine by at least half a century, Granny’s openly predatory libido makes your realise how sleazy and distasteful the Wolf’s antics must have seemed to Red. Granny and Wolf’s sex-crazed antics were frowned upon by the censor for being too suggestive and cuts were demanded, qualifying the short for many ‘banned cartoon’ lists in future years.
The cartoon is often cited as one of the all-time greats and was immensely popular at the time, not only due to Avery’s zany knockabout humor, but also because of the “red hot” showgirl, physically based on Betty Grable and later an influence on the Jessica Rabbit character in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Red was animated by Preston Blair, later famous for some of the best “how to” animation books, still in use by students and animators today.
Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is an list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. Click here to see all of the picks of the list so far. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome!