Hot Rod and Reel!

The wolf is one of the most present characters in fairy tales, and from these – often used as the basis for early cartoons – he soon enters the bestiary of animated films. Right from the start, it makes its mark with one of the most famous villains in the world of cartoons, the Big Bad Wolf from The Three Little Pigs, the most successful of the Silly Symphonies series, which won an Oscar in 1933. This first bad wolf already has the same characteristics as previous wolves (of fairy tales) and those to come (of cartoons): he is pure expression of his desire to eat the little pigs that regularly escape him. The cartoon was so successful that it was immediately copied everywhere and gave way to many Disney variations.

A Big Bad Wolf also appeared in Little Boy Blue (The Big Bad Wolf) by Ub Iwerks, who had left Disney Studios in 1930 after starting the successful Silly Symphonies series. And especially after having been the first illustrator of Mickey Mouse.

The Trial of Mister Wolf by F. Freleng still features the Big Bad Wolf and the Little Pigs. After having long pursued indestructible – and sometimes obnoxious – little pigs in the unassailable safety of the lime and brick house built by Jimmy, the Practical Pig who well personifies the ideal of the virtuous and hard-working American – the cartoon wolf tries to move on to sheep, his usual prey in reality. Like good sheep, the sheep are unresponsive and graze blissfully and undifferentiated with their eyes closed, one the same as the others, uninvolved in the obstinacy of the technical-utilitarian machinations of the bourgeois piglets. Things do not change much, however, for the wolf: he continues to remain dry-mouthed, but the punishments (these are constant and true leitmotifs of the epic saga from Big Bad Wolf to Wile E. Coyote) are now inflicted on him by the sheepdog.

The Sheepish Wolf by F. Freleng (creator of the Pink Panther and co-author of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck) is the first cartoon to bring together the elements of a new wolf-sheepdog trio. The same characters reappear in I Got Plenty of Mutton, F. Tashlin's wartime masterpiece, where the wolf, starved by food rationing, is pitted against the fearsome Killer Diller Ram, the sheepdog who defends the flock. This dog is very Ecomile to Sam Sheepdog, who takes scrupulous care of Ralph Wolf, virtually identical to Wile E. Coyote, another Chuck Kent Jones creature. Sam Sheepdog is always motionless, his eyes covered by his forelock, but he always stands in the exact spot where the wolf will carry out his refined yet vain attack. The ‘snow-white guardian’ is a perfect personification of the superego, which seeks to block all attempts at libido satisfaction. The sheep, on this side of the threshold of perceiving an individual identity, are always oblivious and indifferent to the conflict between the violent drives of the wolf (of the Id) and the relentless coercive demands of the sheepdog. Hostilities between the two, however, are strictly limited to working hours: every morning they clock in and out and have breakfast together, greeting each other cordially «Good morning Sam», «Good morning Ralph» before plunging into daily hostilities, perfectly aware of their roles and the impossibility of getting out of them. But Chuck Jones' most famous wolfish creature is Wile E. Coyote, the protagonist together with Road Runner-Beep Beep of a successful series with existentialist-metaphysical aspects The exploits of the two protagonists repeat themselves incessantly without apparent changes: in the minimalist scenery of the desert, the Coyote tries by all means to capture the Road Runner To compensate for his lack of speed, the Coyote, who believes himself to be a genius, resorts to the terrifying inventions of a mysterious firm, Acme, which regularly supplies him in this war. From the inviting-looking crates, the only ones capable of shaking the Coyote out of detached resignation and giving him moments of participatory involvement, come out gimmicks as refined as they are useless (advanced technology that does not deliver what it promises), which always backfire on their wielder. The beautiful backdrops of the California desert help provide a sense of abstraction and loneliness and offer an appropriate setting for the succession of adventures constructed by consciously resorting to a very high number of constants. In addition to the rules of comedy, Jones plays here with seriality, endlessly repeating the same basic structure and limiting the variations to the bare minimum necessary to make the repetitiveness stimulating. In this rarefied and minimal environment even the characters are highly stylized and move in a context strongly marked by obvious epigonal and parodic traits. In fact, Jones and his screenwriter Michael Maltese really wanted to parody classic cartoon hunts. The characters follow in the footsteps of their predecessors by once again summarizing and repeating, in minimal and highly stylized terms, the now well-codified themes of the wolf saga in cartoons. Everything has already been done. everything has already been said, and especially the protagonists themselves are well aware of this. In one episode the Coyote addresses his animators directly and with a sign asks, «What if we finish the cartoon before I end up in the ravine?».

There is no longer a trace of the bloodthirsty, primal aggression of the Big Bad Wolf of the early cartoons, a bad wolf drooling with lust, black with red, torn and badly tied pants that barely cover his hairy, sinewy legs. He is no longer a big, bad wolf, but a coyote – a small wolf – with refined, mellowed features. The same loss of pathos involves the “prey” as well: Beep Beep shows not the slightest apprehension; in fact, he does not even seem to notice the pitfalls being brought to him. But these characters have lost nothing of their vitality, only a little nuanced by irony and self-mockery, and their charge of (human) sympathy.

An intact charge of vitality, of unrestrained and exuberant sensuality, on the other hand, is still present in all of Tex Avery's wolves, who over the course of multiple appearances achieve their own accomplished identity in the character of Wolf (or Woolfy).

«Wolf: the great villain of Avery's cartoons, is also the eternal loser, the male who goes mad for the ballerina Red, i.e., Little Red Riding Hood, without ever succeeding in possessing her. In his more evolved version, which is the MGM version, Wolf tries to hide his character as long as he can, but he will never succeed. Even underneath the bourgeois clothes is hidden the wolf in us, ready to squint his eyes, dangle half a foot of his tongue, and bang his head against a pole. [...] As soon as Avery switched to MGM, he brought the wolf with him. He is Adolf Wolf the star of the incredible Blitz Wolf, where he is a Nazi general grappling with the American sergeant Pork and his three little pig brothers. The drawing and his animation [...] are extraordinary, and the film had a just Oscar nomination. [...] Wolf is always over the top, he expresses every feeling excessively, he doesn't back down from anything, he is 'bigger than life'. Tirelessly he is always running after a woman or on the run from Droopy. He can cover the whole world in the seven minutes of the cartoon. [...] Great are his appearances with the dancer Red (Red Hot Riding Hood, Little Rural Riding Hood) in addition to the times he meets Droopy (Wild and Woolfy). [...] Endless were the troubles he had with MGM's internal censorship and that of the Hays code, so certain wild scenes were cut for theaters and shown only to the military, who were crazy about his erotic cartoons». (Marco Giusti, Fabrizio Liberti and Bruno Fornara, “Bestiario”, in What's Up, Tex? The Cinema of Tex Avery, edited by Michele Fadda and Fabrizio Liberti, Lindau, Turin 1997, p. 227)

Wolf! Wolf!