Zipping Along

It's strange how your perspective shifts as you get older. When I was a young devotee of ROADRUNNER, it was the titular hero I identified with, his speed, obviously, his unassailability, his grace, his freedom, his cheek. Watching him again, nearly two decades on, I find that the real hero of the cartoon is not this miraculous popinjay, but his hapless nemesis, Wil E. Coyote.

There is something monstrous and inhuman about Roadrunner's indestructability, but nothing heroic. He is a creature of instinct, he is what he is, a road runner. We should no more applaud his skill than we should marvel at rain falling. Even his mockery seems mechanical, unwilled. He is something abstract, ungraspable, a hurtling metaphor for all we fail to achieve in life.

Wil E. we can love, identify with. He has a name. Like all self-willed names, it is preposterously inappropriate. Although part of his failure can be attributed to his enemy's fleet feet, it is his ineptitude that is mostly to blame. His wily schemes are incompetently conceived in the heat of the moment - the eternal chase allows no room for pause.

These cartoons are a further elaboration of Buster Keaton's Beckettian agonies - here plot is completely abandoned, for a daring, perpetual repetition, where closure is forever denied. Because the only closure could be death - Road Runner's, Wil E.'s, or ours. We will never pin down that which we can sense, but cannot hold. And yet we must continued to try, because stillness can only lead to thoughts of mortality and despair.

Chuck Jones' imagination only improves with age. The Cezanne-like geometrics are a marvel to behold. The saturated colours still dazzle, and the backgrounds, part simplistic children's book illustration, part bleak dreamscape, are as piercingly evocative as ever. The insane and complex variations on what is essentially a simple, inexorable plot are breathtaking, and puts almost everything that was stumbling lamely out of Hollywood at the time to shame. Jones, horribly underrated, was at least as great a director as Keaton, Hawks or Sirk, and it is about time we said so. So I did.

Chuck Jones's 'Zipping Along', the fourth cartoon in the Road Runner series, is notable for how it increases the relationship between the Coyote and the audience. The gags are hit and miss, ranging from hilarious (the mouse trap gag is still among my favourites) to dull (the bomb and the kite) or genuinely weak (the double "meep meep" from the Road Runner and the dust he leaves behind). However, the reaction shots of the Coyote are all priceless and there are many more of them than in the opening trio of cartoons. His endearingly defeated glances to the audience are capable of turning a weak gag into a hilarious one. For example, the nonsensical joke with the giant magnet and the TNT is improved 100% by the extremely brief look of horror the Coyote shoots our way a millisecond before the explosion. It's the tiniest piece of animation but it's monumentally effective. There are numerous little moments like that all the way through 'Zipping Along', considerably heightening its enjoyment factor. It's also notable for the fact that it is the first Road Runner cartoon not to close with the Coyote being hit by a vehicle which the Road Runner is on board. He is hit by a vehicle at the finale and we do hear a "meep meep" afterwards but it doesn't come from the Road Runner!

Another great Road Runner & Wile E. Coyote short from Chuck Jones. Once again, Coyote is trying his darnedest to catch the bird with no luck. Some hilarious gags, including grenades, mouse traps, hypnosis, and a wonderful telephone pole bit. Excellent animation in this one. Beautiful colors with well-drawn characters and backgrounds. I really love some of these early Road Runner shorts when the gags were so fresh and the animation so crisp. There were certainly some amazing ones later, too, but there's just something dynamic about some of the earlier ones. If you're a fan of the series, you'll no doubt love this one. It doesn't reinvent the wheel or anything but it does give you lots of laughs crammed into six minutes.

I like these opening graphics which give us various "scientific names" of the two main characters. This time, the roadrunner - who is shown outracing a fast train - is labeled "velocitus tremenjus." Wile E. Coyote, watching from above, is now labeled "Road Runnerus Digestus."

Wile E.'s slapstick attempts at getting the bird include a hand grenade, mousetraps, a giant kite with a big bomb, falling telephone poles, bird seed with steel shot and a giant magnet, hypnotism, a giant boulder, shotguns and more! It's unbelievable how many attempts the coyote makes in each cartoon with the predictable results.

This wasn't one of the funnier episodes, I didn't think, although it was entertaining as always.

The life of a predator isn't what it's cracked up to be! He must be up to his eyeballs in debt to Acme (or has a sizable source of funds), his medical bills equally large and for what? A singular lack of success in catching one bird! I say give up, get a pizza and take up stamp collecting. Great fun and worth watching. Recommended.