Tex Avery is considered the most important influence on Hollywood studio cartoons after Walt Disney. The career of this legendary director, who created Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Droopy, among others, spanned fifty years and took him to most of the major cartoon studios, including Walter Lantz, Warner Bros., MGM, and Hanna-Barbera. His formative years were at Warner Bros., where, in the mid-1930s, his innovative directorial spark dazzled and inspired colleagues such as Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, and Frank Tashlin, all of whom went on to become industry stars themselves. Avery had a long tenure at MGM's cartoon unit where his high-octane, uninhibited, joyously cartoon-y ideas flowered into some of the greatest (and funniest) animated film shorts ever made. Avery's body of work during the Golden Era of the Hollywood cartoon is a creative legacy that continues to impact contemporary directors of animation and live action, in feature films such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Mask, as well as in television. Although warmly admired as a film genius by colleagues in the industry and adored by the international cartoon cognoscenti, Avery never shared in the tremendous expansion of the animation industry into television or feature films in a studio of his own, nor did he own the licensing/merchandising rights to the cartoon characters he created and brought to vital life. Original storyboards, character sketches, and animation cels highlight the career of this important artist, who created sixty-five classic films and numerous unforgettable characters in his fourteen-year stint at MGM. Walt Disney's animation strove to duplicate reality, but Tex Avery's steered clear of the limitations of lifelike action, and today's cartoons owe far more to Avery's over-the-top style than to Disney's staidness. Since his 1980 death, Avery has been getting his belated critical due, culminating in this lavish art book. Avery was instrumental in developing Bugs Bunny and the other Warner Brothers cartoon stars, but this retrospective focuses on his artistic pinnacle at MGM in the 1940s and 1950s. There, his vivid comic imagination flowered in maniacally paced masterpieces full of wild gags and zany characters. Welcomely light on text--though Canemaker's commentary is informed and insightful--the volume is loaded with well-reproduced animation cels, storyboards, and other artwork. So classy a tribute to an anarchic, rowdy artist like Avery may seem somehow inappropriate, but with producers of crude made-for-TV-cartoons like Hanna-Barbera getting coffee-table treatment these days, heck, Avery deserves a banquet-table tome. Gordon Flagg