Tex Avery – The Great Animation Director from the Golden Age of the Hollywood Cartoon

By John Canemaker

Turner Publishing Inc, 1996

10" x 13", 224 pages

This is, at first, a deceptive book for those, like me, who are looking for insights on how Tex Avery worked. There are only 12 pages of biography at the beginning of this book where we learn trivias about Tex Avery's life and some of his habits. That's all. Most of that information is already available in about all the other books or documentaries that present Avery's work.

The whole rest of the book consist of descriptions of Avery's cartoons with comments about Avery's evolution as a gagman and director. It seems that so little information are available about Avery himself and his work methods that all books that covers Avery's work are reduced to do that, that is attempt to discover Avery's personality and work methods through the analysis of his cartoons.

The parts I enjoyed the most in this book, and by far, are the numerous Model sheets. They are really inspiring and are much more lively than the reproduced cartoon cells. In just a few drawings, we get to really feel the personality of each character. There are also numerous reproduction of animation drawings, that is drawings that were later inked and painted, as well as numerous painted cells. But none of them manage to match the vitality and personality that are displayed in the model sheets. We all know that painted cells loose some of the vitality of the pencil drawings. This is another aspect that the book shows from the choice of drawings and cells that are reproduced. But the model sheets are really in a class apart. They are like a serie of snapshots taken out of the character designer's brain. They are really designed to efficiently show the character's personality instead of showing the character in action although some of the poses in the model sheets are clearly action poses. Cell poses are poses with a purpose while model sheet poses have the only purpose to communicate the character personality. All main characters model sheets as well as several secondary characters model sheets are reproduced. For me, the model sheets alone are worth the price of the book.