The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie (1979)

          Despite including only about 10 minutes of original content, this cartoon anthology movie is worth a casual viewing simply because the old material it presents is so enjoyable. Just as That’s Entertainment! (1974) did with snippets of MGM movies, The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie celebrates the legacy of a particular studio by offering a fast-paced highlight reel. However, in this case the “studio” is actually a brand associated with one particular Warner Bros. Pictures animation unit—the legendary Looney Tunes moniker that adorned hundreds of ’toons starring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and other beloved characters. Overseen by Chuck Jones, the classic Looney Tunes director who made many of Bugs’ best films, The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie features Bugs (voiced, as always, by Mel Blanc) hosting a retrospective of his career.

          In the opening bits, Bugs hangs around his estate and explains the history of screen comedy—cave paintings beget movies, which beget slapstick, which beget action-packed Looney Tunes. (This brief but amusing bit comprises most of the new material.) Thereafter, Bugs either appears on camera or narrates while the film presents clips from classic Looney Tunes and/or entire shorts. Most of the material features Bugs, of course, and there’s a lot of Daffy and Porky, along with some Pepe Le Peu, too. As the title suggests, the Road Runner makes an appearance, though all of the Road Runner stuff is presented in a 15-minute montage of sight gags at the end of the picture. Like most anthology films, The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie runs out of gas—the Road Runner sequence is inherently repetitive, and it’s also far too long—but the best material is fantastic.

          Featured shorts include “Duck Amuck,” ‘Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century,” “For Scent-inmental Reasons,” and so on. Since these shorts are all rightfully regarded as classics of the form, the bulk of the picture comprises a nonstop barrage of imaginative animation, masterfully timed comedy, and peerless vocal performances by the astounding Mr. Blanc. Purists can argue (with good reason) that these classic ’toons should only be consumed in their original form, but The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie is hard to beat as a sampler platter. Additionally, there’s one notable behind-the-scenes aspect to the project. Earlier in the ’70s, Looney Tunes animator Bob Clampett hosted a quasi-documentary called Bugs Bunny Superstar (1974), which reportedly annoyed Jones by implying that Clampett was Bugs’ principal creator. Jones returned the insult by excluding Clampett from a sequence in The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie during which Bugs names his various “fathers.” Ouch.

The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie: GROOVY

Charlotte’s Web (1973)

          Even cynics cry once in a while. For instance, one of my surefire triggers for waterworks is Charlotte’s Web, the miraculous children’s book by E.B. White that was originally published in 1952. A bittersweet story about friendship and mortality, Charlotte’s Web presents grown-up themes in a magical context, and the ending of the story slays me today as much as it did when I first read the book during childhood. I mention the power of White’s story to explain why I cut this animated adaptation a lot of slack, even though the film contains sentimental excesses that drift far afield from the melancholy textures of the source material. Speaking in the broadest terms, the filmmakers present White’s story intact—retaining even the most downbeat elements—so unnecessary filigrees such as boisterous musical numbers are merely interruptions. The basic narrative is so powerful that nothing can fully diminish its impact.

          For those unfamiliar with the tale, the hero of the story is a pig named Wilbur. He’s born on a farm, but because he’s a runt, he’s plucked from the litter for quick slaughter. The farmer’s daughter, a young girl named Fern, pleads for Wilbur’s life and is given responsibility for raising him. As a result, he grows to maturity with a gentle demeanor since all he’s ever known is TLC. Alas, Wilbur gets sold to a neighboring farm, where he’s again lined up for slaughter. Yet Wilbur’s sweet nature endears him to other animals on his new farm, including a sophisticated brown spider named Charlotte A. Cavatica. Eager to protect her new friend, Charlotte spins a web containing the words “some pig,” which transforms Wilbur into a small-town celebrity. This special relationship continues through to a heartbreaking finale that says volumes about the cyclical nature of life. I’m biased, of course, but I would go so far as to say that Charlotte’s Web is one of the loveliest stories created by an American author in the 20th century.

          Animation was definitely the right means for making a screen version of Charlotte’s Web, since it’s hard to imagine cozying up to a live-action arachnid. Alas, budget-conscious production company Hanna-Barbera never aimed for the same level of visual beauty as the folks at Disney, so this version of Charlotte’s Web is perfunctory in terms of images and motion. The character designs are fine, and the background settings get the job done, but the look of Charlotte’s Web is only slightly better than that of a standard Saturday-morning cartoon from the ’70s. Furthermore, the musical score is palatable at best. While songwriting brothers Richard B. Sherman and Robert M. Sherman (of Mary Poppins fame) fill their tunes with heart and playful language, their style doesn’t fit with the humble elegance of White’s storytelling. (Similarly, narrator Rex Allen’s aw-shucks line deliveries add a cornpone, Will Rogers-influenced flavor that lowers the intelligence level of the material.)

          Happily, the best elements of this movie are the most important—the vocal performances. Henry Gibson, of all people, finds a kindhearted but not sticky-sweet pocket for Wilbur’s speaking voice, capturing the character’s innocence. Paul Lynde channels his queeny bitchery into the comic-relief role of Templeton, a rat who serves as Charlotte’s de facto errand boy. And Debbie Reynolds is just about perfect as Charlotte—amiable, sad, and wise all at once. She also gets to sing the most delicate song the Shermans wrote for the peace, a philosophical number called “Mother Earth and Father Time.”

          Perhaps because this movie was the means by which many people first discovered White’s luminous story, the Hanna-Barbera version of Charlotte’s Web has enjoyed a long life in the marketplace, even earning a straight-to-video sequel, Charlotte’s Web 2: Wilbur’s Great Adventure, in 2003. (The sequel featured an all-new story, because White never wrote a follow-up book.) A live-action version of Charlotte’s Web was released in 2006, with an all-star cast including Julia Roberts and Robert Redford voicing animal characters rendered with CGI.

Charlotte’s Web: GROOVY

The Phantom Tollbooth (1970)

          Based on a highbrow children’s book that was originally published in 1961, the (mostly) animated film The Phantom Tollbooth is noteworthy as the only feature directed by the great Chuck Jones. (His classic Looney Tunes include Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, and his beloved TV specials include The Grinch Who Stole Christmas!) Unfortunately, the magic combination of verbal and visual wit that makes Jones’ best short subjects so entertaining failed to materialize for The Phantom Tollbooth. Thanks to the smart source material, as well the careful execution by Jones and his collaborators, the picture is edifying, but it’s also repetitive. The story could easily have been told in an hour or even 45 minutes without losing anything important, so watching the thing drag across 90 minutes becomes a chore. Further, the biggest burden the movie carries is a gooey song score, which is exactly the sort of sentimental excess one rarely found in Jones’ best ’toons. More likely than not, MGM included the music in order to copy Walt Disney’s successful formula, but the numbers in The Phantom Tollboothnever match Disney’s level of quality.

          As for the underlying narrative, it’s clever if perhaps a bit too fanciful and literary for G-rated literary entertainment. In a live-action opening sequence set in modern-day San Francisco, a latchkey kid named Milo (played by Butch Patrick of The Munsters) whines about being bored until a magical tollbooth materializes in his apartment. The tollbooth comes complete with a miniature car. Milo hops into the car and passes through the tollbooth, at which point he becomes a cartoon, as does the whole movie. Cartoon Milo drives his cartoon car through a fantastic realm in which concepts and words are personified literally, so nearly every scene involves a pun or some other play on words.

          The theme of Milo’s adventure is that he needs to learn respect for knowledge, because a stimulated mind is never bored. So, for instance, Milo gets stuck in “the doldrums,” a kind of grimy limbo for people who don’t think; the actual doldrums are personified as gelatinous globs that slink around and speak verrrry sloooowly. Later, Milo ends up in a land of letters and a land of numbers; avoids “the mountains of ignorance”; interacts with such creatures as the Humbug and the Spelling Bee; and eventually clashes with a villain known as “The Terrible Trivial.”

          Some of this material is great, from the elevated dialogue of the Humbug (“A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect”) to the visual gag of cartoon Milo using a giant number “4” as a bow and spelled-out words as arrows. But particularly once the movie transforms into standard fantasy epic during the climax (cartoon Milo and his new friends must rescue princesses in order to restore order to the cartooniverse), The Phantom Tollbooth gets overly plot-driven. To be fair, the filmmakers tackled a huge challenge by building a story around a bored kid—not the most engaging of protagonists—and Patrick doesn’t do the movie any favors. Both in his live-action scenes (at the beginning and end of the film) and in his vocal performance throughout the picture, he’s merely ordinary. Conversely, veteran voice actors including Mel Blanc, Hans Conreid, and June Foray enliven their various roles with typical flair.

 The Phantom Tollbooth: FUNKY

Wizards (1977)

          The weirdest thing about Wizards is that the movie isn’t particularly weird. After all, the animated adventure was the first full-on fantasy film from maverick animator Ralph Bakshi, who made his mark with the X-rated cartoon feature Fritz the Cat (1972). Yet for this project, which is a hybrid of Tolkein-esque medieval/magic tropes and ecologically themed sci-fi, Bakshi mostly dialed back on the provocation and concentrated on spinning a yarn. Unfortunately, the yarn isn’t very good.

          In the distant future, after man has turned Earth into a wasteland, two sibling wizards—good Avatar (voiced by Bob Holt) and evil Blackwolf (voiced by Steve Gravers)—battle for control. Avatar’s all about nature, since he’s a mellow little dude who lives in a castle with a sexy faerie, whereas Blackwolf is a demonic-looking creature ruling an army of hell-spawned monsters, homicidal robots, and killer mutants. The bulk of the story depicts Avatar’s difficult trek from his castle to Blackwolf’s lair for a final standoff, and a major subplot involves Avatar’s conversion of one of Blackwolf’s assassins—a robot whom Avatar captures and renames “Peace” (voiced by David Proval)—into a soldier for good.

          This is all exactly as heavy-handed as it sounds, though the hipster prism through which Bakshi tells his tale makes the movie a bit more palatable than it might have otherwise. For instance, Avatar is prone to saying things like “this has been the biggest bummer trip I’ve ever been on.” He’s an appealing character, even though his attitude and lingo now seem dated.

          Bakshi employs the crude but innovative animation techniques that were his ’70s signature, occasionally sprucing up traditional cel-animation shots with trippy backgrounds that are generated by optical effects. He also spotlights herky-jerky images created by filming real actors and then tracing their basic shapes onto film frames to provide an effect akin to moving silhouettes. (During the picture’s climax, Bakshi takes the experiment further by integrating live-action footage, cutting to real shots of airplanes and tanks while Avatar’s army tangles with Blackwolf’s forces.) The oddest—and least effective—of Bakshi’s gimmicks involves cutting to montages of still drawings for transitional moments. As an uncredited Susan Tyrell soberly intones expositional voiceover, renderings by comic-book/magazine artist Mike Ploog depict scenes that Bakshi didn’t bother to animate. In addition to slowing down the action, these transitional moments make the rest of the movie look crappy by comparison, since Ploog’s drawings are beautifully detailed.

          Another significant problem with Wizards is that Bakshi, who also wrote and produced the film, can’t decide on a consistent tone—the movie lurches back and forth between action and slapstick and social commentary. In short, it’s a mess. Still, every so often Bakshi’s mad-scientist approach results in something exciting or funny or touching, and the one thing the movie can’t be said to lack is imagination.

Wizards: FUNKY

Bugs Bunny: Superstar (1975)

          You might think a fluffy documentary tracing the origins of a popular cartoon character could evade controversy. You’d be wrong. Although it only includes about 30 minutes of original material (the rest of the movie comprises full-length vintage cartoons), Bugs Bunny: Superstarmanaged to aggravate long-simmering tensions among the mad geniuses behind Bugs, Daffy, Elmer, Porky, and the other Looney Tunes mainstays. Watching the movie today, it’s not hard to see why—Bob Clampett, one of several prolific Looney Tunes directors, hosts the movie in scripted sequences that suggest he single-handedly oversaw the creation of every major character. Considering the equally important roles of animators including Tex Avery, Friz Freleng, and Chuck Jones, Clampett’s amiably megalomaniacal dominance of Bugs Bunny: Superstar is a major disservice to film history. However, if you can tolerate Clampett’s inexplicable narcissism, Bugs Bunny: Superstar is mildly entertaining.

          The documentary bits, which are narrated by Orson Welles, feature Clampett in an office filled with artifacts like animation cels and character-model statues. He shares interesting trivia, such as the number of cels used in an average ’40s Looney Tune—10,000 drawings for seven minutes of screen time—and he introduces wonderful home-movie footage of the animators who kept “Termite Terrace,” the building on the Warner Bros. lot where the ’toons were made, lively. Clampett’s contemporaries, including Freleng and Jones, appear during brief interview clips, mostly spewing platitudes about how much they enjoyed the working environment at Termite Terrace, so Clampett—with his loud, patch-covered windbreaker and his helmet-like hairpiece—emerges as the only memorable non-animated figure. (Even voice actor Mel Blanc and music composer Carl Stalling, both of whom were crucial to the greatness of Looney Tunes, are relegated to sidekick status.)

          As for the shorts featured in the movie, they’re okay—although even mediocre Looney Tunes are entertaining, Clampett-directed work is favored to a fault. (Seriously, where are the Chuck Jones-helmed masterpieces including What’s Opera, Doc?) Anyway, while Bugs Bunny: Superstar wasn’t actually produced by Warner Bros., Warner Bros. built on the documentary’s minor success by making additional Looney Tunes anthologies, beginning with the 1979 release The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie, a compilation flick assembled by Jones; further anthology pictures were released in the ’80s. As for Bugs Bunny: Superstar, it’s best viewed today as an interesting museum piece, since various DVD bonus-feature docs produced by Warner Bros. in the 2000s tell the Looney Tunes story with greater accuracy.

Bugs Bunny: Superstar: FUNKY