Starts with a bang. It’s 9 o’clock of a winter evening, and everyone is tossing their cats out of the door. Porky expels three Sylvester-like felines, and then a fourth, tiny kitten throws him out. This is a Bob Clampett film all over the place: really manic, really energetic, chock-full of jokes. In this case—sometimes Clampett films are too much of a good thing—the jokes are pretty well all successful. For instance the room that is transformed into a billiard table, or the part where they pull on that moose bust and the whole moose body pops out. Tons of surrealism here, happy impossibilities, and a lot of the gags that feature physics/plausibility-defying transformations and metamorphoses. There’s a fun War of the Worlds (O. Welles) bit, and at one point the cats turn into four Teddy Roosevelts. We don’t know why. Animation historian Michael Barrier expresses great appreciation, over there on that second track commentary. Imagine achieving a feeling of spontaneity in the midst of a process as belaboured as animation!
