The setting/situation, with little Tweety like some avian pillar saint perched in the cold between those two very urban apartment buildings, is superb: Beckett-like, elemental, primordial. How vulnerable are the little ones! Except for this little one, who actually isn’t vulnerable at all, his vast diminutiveness notwithstanding. Have you ever noticed? Tweety is never scared! His films reassure kids by telling them that the meek shall indeed inherit the earth, even if they’re not particularly meek.
This picture is not very consistent with its setting, nor with the urban naturalism that tended to emerge from settings like it. It’s way too hopeful! In this way, I guess, Putty Tat Trouble is like many little Warner Brothers’ cartoons—Birth of a Notion , Water Water Every Hare, etc.—that domesticated horror films, and went their way toward calming kids’ fairy tale anxieties. (Sesame Street will take this on later, and in a much more systematic manner.) The sources are very serious, and substantial. Derivations like these are completely for fun, for laughs. Don’t be fooled, though. There’s a theme, tremendously substantial, tremendously successful. Here are the realities, kids. And you’ll be all right.
Wide! :
