Animation Series Continues at LACMA’s Bing Theater

The splendid series “Enchanted Drawings: The Hollywood Animated Film” continues Friday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Bing Theater with “Four Masters” (Ub Iwerks, George Pal, Paul Terry and Walter Lantz) and Saturday with “Warner Bros.: Part II.”

The most delightful offering of Friday’s program (at 1 and 8 p.m.) is Iwerks’ “Merry Mannequins” (1937), which imagines a wedding of two department store window dummies attended by all the furniture and appliances in the store. It’s a triumph of the all-inclusive Art Deco style--even the window box on the newlyweds’ model home has a ziggurat design. The entire film, which is in color, is like a ‘30s Sears catalogue come alive; it is also reminiscent of the department store sequence in “Modern Times” and of an Astaire-Rogers production number. Also enchanting is Iwerks’ “Balloonland” (1935), a blithe adventure in which the kingdom of the balloon people is menaced by the deadly Pin Cushion Man.

There’s a similar fairy-tale quality to George Pal’s Puppetoon “The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins” (1942), based on a Dr. Seuss story and featuring Pal’s three-dimensional puppets. Poor little Bartholomew: No sooner does he doff his hat to his king than another materializes on his head--which he is about to lose for his lack of deference to his sovereign. The resolution of this charming film turns it into a deft parable. Pal is also represented by one of his most famous works, “Tubby the Tuba” (1940), which features a whole symphony orchestra of instruments that play themselves, highlighted by the venturesome, innovative Tubby. More conventional is Paul Terry’s “The Green Line,” in which an evil Batcat tempts a cat to cross over the line that has long separated a small-town’s cat and mice populations. Have no fear, it’s Mighty Mouse to the rescue to do battle with Batcat.

Nearly half the Friday program is devoted to the work of Walter Lantz, creator of Woody Woodpecker and many other characters. Among the Lantz offerings is the pre-Woody 1933 “Confidence,” in which Oswald Rabbit enlists a singing F.D.R. in chasing away those Depression blues. Along with “Knock Knock,” the 1940 Andy Panda short that introduced Woody Woodpecker, the insistent bird is seen in the 1951 “Sleep Happy” in which Woody’s lawn-mowing disturbs a man’s sleep, with all-out war ensuing, typical of ever-increasing cartoon violence. The 1955 “Crazy Mixed-Up Pup” is a piece of breezy mayhem concocted by Tex Avery for Lantz and involving a blood plasma mix-up between a man and his dog, which results in a body exchange. This film is charged with nonstop energy, with one incident quickly triggering the next, and this is also true of Shamus Culhane’s 1944 “Barber of Seville” (for Lantz), featuring Woody carrying on to Rossini in fine fashion.

“Warner Bros.: Part II” (at 10:15 a.m. and 8 p.m.) commences with Chuck Jones’ 1950 variation on Culhane, “Rabbit of Seville” featuring Bugs Bunny. It’s great to see, after 30 years, the classic work of Friz Freleng and Chuck Jones, a pair of modern masters. Featured are the eternally warring Road-Runner and Wile E. Coyote, and the equally combative Tweety and Sylvester, with Elmer Fudd often on hand. The tiny, elusive, Tweety is in a class by himself, as funny as he is infuriating. Unlike many of their contemporaries, Jones and Freleng created stylized, minimalist backgrounds for their creatures, in contrast to the sentimental realism of the settings of the cartoons of Disney and others. There’s also a dandy by Robert McKimson and “For Scent-imental Reasons” (1949), which marked the debut of the amusingly amorous French skunk, Pepe le Pew.

If you grew up at the movies in the ‘40s and ‘50s, you may well have overdosed on cartoons, especially when you grew old enough to become turned off by their extreme violence. So it’s a pleasure to rediscover Freleng and Jones, who are ceaselessly inventive. Their graphics not only represent the finest of the ‘50s style but also look totally undated. There’s a dry, nihilistic wit and sophistication to their work, which also seems strikingly contemporary.

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