Les dessins animés de la Métro-Goldwin-Mayer

By Patrick Brion

Éditions de la martinière, 1999

10¼" x 12½", 360 pages

I was doing tourism with my wife in my own town and I entered in a book store. After looking for books on cinema, I found this book: "Les dessins animés de la Métro-Goldwin-Mayer". The translation would be "Metro-Goldwin-Meyer animated cartoons". A big book almost the size of "The Illusion of Life".

Although quite a large book, I could read it in about 3 nights. There is less information to learn about the MGM cartoon department in this book than in "Hollywood Cartoons" or "Of Mice and Magic". But that is not the purpose of this book. The book is filled with color frames from the different films produced by MGM so that was a nice read anyway. The book also contains a detailed filmography with a complete description of each film. About 3 or 4 film descriptions per page with at least one picture from the film. All in french though.

It is always a pleasure to read about this wild animator who was Tex Avery. This book offers a chronology of Avery's contributions in a slightly different way than I read elsewhere. It is so hard to find infos and anecdotes concerning Tex Avery, even in books dedicated solely to Tex Avery, that reading his story in this book was nice. But for its price, I would hesitate to recommend buying this book. This is definitely not an "how-to" book by any stretch of imagination.