Sunday, January 4, 2015

The Sneezing Weasel: Takin' Care of Business, Cartoon-Style


RELEASE DATE: March 12, 1938 (according to the Big Cartoon Database)
DVD/BLU-RAY AVAILABILITY:
none at present

You can watch this cartoon  HERE. Enjoy!


1938 is the year Warner Brothers' cartoons begin to feel like Warner Brothers cartoons. All the key players were present--including some who would depart (Friz Freleng, Frank Tashlin) then return in stronger form.

In the meantime, cartoons had to be made, and a yearly schedule fulfilled. Our hero, Fred "Tex" Avery, continues his pattern of a breakthrough cartoon followed by several misfires/near misses. The Sneezing Weasel is one of those also-rans: a warehouse for half-developed concepts that its creator would refine, uplift and transcend in his more acclaimed M-G-M period.

The tentative feel of the mid-1930s Warner cartoons is almost gone. In its place is a brash, cheerful strut. This confidence was sufficient to create the illusion of entertainment, regardless of the content and quality of an individual cartoon. In this same manner, the live-action Warner features bluffed their way into audience's hearts, masking weak narratives and wafer-thin characters with a hearty howzitgoin, mac?

Still coasting on the buzz of Little Red Walking Hood, Avery fashions another minor attack on the wishy-washy cartoons of the day. This film's storyline could have been a Hugh Harman/Rudolph Ising M-G-M animated melodrama. It follows a tiresome cookie-cutter narrative that all the cartoon studios, on both coasts, told to sickening excess in the last half of the decade.

Avery isn't phoning it in here, but he is subsumed by the very weakness he satirizes.

Anyhow, he starts with a reminder that this is NOT a Walt Disney production: