Blobcartoon Lupi

Frank Tashlin knew this well, and Fritz Freleng and Tex Avery as well. Wolves, the ones that make people laugh, the ones that scare children, are beautiful to draw. Big teeth out, black black fur, gigantic tail, squinting bloodshot eyes, red red ball nose... Red ball nose? Squinting eyes? Tashlin, Freleng and Avery had realised that all they had to do was push the envelope a little, smooth out the edges, exaggerate the nose, eyes and mouth, or even put on a moustache instead of a big, beastly moustache, and a terrible wolf could become a comic wolf. That is, a wolf that moves like a madman out of hunger, not only for food, but especially for sex. Always ready to come up with some trick to devour a sheep or a piglet, but also to nibble on some little red riding hood lost in the woods or in a city nightclub. One of the great inventions of what we can call the Warner school, was precisely to turn the terrible Disney wolf, the one who tried to eat the little pigs, in short, the one who was supposed to look like the spectre of the Great Depression to the American public, into a ridiculous wolf, into a human wolf who ends up representing all the males of the Earth in a futile race behind a skirt. ‘Put your hands on me, wolf,’ sings the Red Riding Hood from the great Metro cartoons directed by Tex Avery, a compact body of masterpieces now adored all over the world. The wolf opens his mouth wide, his tongue falls limply to the table, while his eyes go off on their own behind the girl, his hands take her head and beat it against the table, his teeth mindlessly bite into everything. Avery arrives at the absolute excess of the debasement of the wolf starting from his own male desire. After all, his is an audience of soldiers at war, who also dream of impossible Red Riding Hoods to embrace. Tashlin's wolves, on the other hand, push towards a sophisticated comedy of strong, visual gags, they are ready to disguise themselves (I Got Plenty of Mutton, 1943) like Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot, they play with little food, a pea on the plate, exactly as Jerry Lewis will later do in Artists and Models, directed by Tashlin himself. But his wolf is also strong in the Disney experience, since it was Tashlin himself who graphically set up one of the most beautiful wicked wolves on the screen, the one who tries to eat Peter in Pierino e il lupo. A wolf with a huge mouth and excessive salivation, who does not speak, who cannot be laughed at, but from whom one can only run away after irritating him with the fake rifle. Freleng, on the other hand, plays everything on music and rhythmic gags. His wolves play jazz and dance the boogie woogie with a wild, black-haired redhead. They are Averyan wolves without great excesses, but of great sympathy.

Another Warner great, Robert Clampett, urges a wolf to behave like Humphrey Bogart once he sees the beautiful Laureen Bacall in the cinema. Cheap wolves. Never as dangerous as the brilliant first Big Bad Wolf drawn by Albert Hurter and animated by Norm Ferguson, Fred Moore, Dick Lundy and Art Babbit for the first, immortal The Three Little Pigs directed by Bert Gillett for Disney. A bad wolf not because it opens its mouth wide or because its fur is so straight or its teeth so sharp, but because it is profoundly a bad human, a Dickensian or Chaplinesque character of evil that bases its game on vaudeville masquerade and thus stages the degeneration of the comic. We think of the voice of the old variety and silent film comedian Billy Bletcher, we think of the tuba, the red suit with the suspender. But we also think of his constant mutation from human to beast, from white to black and even to Jew (as he was in the original cartoon that was later censored after the war), of not hiding his body and his desires too much. He is a mutant being like the first cartoon characters, ready to become anything that we think might represent evil. An evil that we define as such, an evil of social, racial, animal diversity. That is why it is so terrible even today. With just one of my powerful puffs ... (Marco Giusti)