Tortoise Wins by a Hare (1943)

Best movie of this year hands down!

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Or why does the turtle always win? Well maybe, it's about the material a lot in racing. But also at least as much in film. And in here is some good material. The races between turtle and rabbit were a famous topic in these old cartoon movies, even if the outcome was always the same. This is the second of 3 Bugs Bunny movies about this topic. And it seems he finally found his match. Not only in the turtle here, but also in a bunch of rabbit brutes from the betting mafia. Bugs decides it must be about the turtle's aerodynamics, so he dresses up like the turtle, but sadly for him he is mistaken by the brutes mentioned before and beaten up several times, so he won't win the race. And who wins it? The turtle. In a rabbit dress of course. When I saw it first in that, I had to laugh. Robert Clampett and Warren Foster, both very prolific back in the day made this short and the voice acting is all about Mel Blanc once again. Michael Maltese did not write this as he usually does, but he did some voice acting in here for the thugs, which is an interesting aspect. Still, I have to say that this 7-minute cartoon is not on par with Disney's Oscar-winning "The Tortoise and the Hare". That one profited a lot from the tortoise being such a gentle and fair sportsman and the turtle in this Warner Bros film here is actually pretty arrogant, which I did not like that much. Nonetheless, this is a solid short film. It could have done with a bit less of the thugs scenes as it gets a bit repetitive towards the end, but it's all good. Recommended.

This is the second of three shorts by Looney Tunes (this follows "Tortoise Beats Hare") featuring Bugs Bunny racing the tortoise--and, as usual, the clever tortoise gets the best of him. In this case, Bugs decides to do a bit of spying before the re-match. The tortoise tells Bugs he won due to his streamline design--so Bugs makes a turtle costume of his own. However, this is NOT a good idea, as a syndicate of gambler rabbits are determined to make sure the tortoise loses the race--and the real tortoise is disguised as a rabbit. The results are quite funny but what comes as a real shock is the extremely violent and dark ending--even compared to other Looney Tunes shorts! Funny and well worth seeing.

Directed by Bob Clampett, "Tortoise Wins by a Hare" is a sequel to the Tex Avery cartoon "Tortoise Beats Hare" (1941), using some stock footage from that short as well. Bugs Bunny once again tries to match wits with Cecil Turtle in a race, and once again Bugs loses. He constructs a steel shell for an "airflow chassis," and he tucks his ears inside of a bathing cap to prevent any wind resistance. Problem is, he resembles a turtle in his getup, and Cecil accordingly disguises himself as a rabbit. The rabbit mob subsequently mistakes Bugs for Cecil, so all the gangsters erroneously inflict all kinds of torture on Bugs to prevent him from winning the race.Some of the better gags from "Tortoise Wins by a Hare" include the following: In order to find out Cecil's secret to winning a race, Bugs disguises himself as an old man with a phony beard, underneath which he conceals a typewriter as he chats with the turtle. Upon Cecil's entrance to the starting line, all of his other turtle friends carry him and very badly sing "He Did It Before and He Can Do It Again." And Bugs opens the short by overreacting in his own amusing way to the film of his losing the last race with Cecil.One final observation: I really feel that the one gag that kills this cartoon is the very ending, in which all the rabbit mobsters blow their brains out upon realizing their mistake. In my opinion, this gag is quite unnecessary and tasteless, and it's no wonder that certain television stations have cut the gag out of their prints.

Hilarious triple inversion not only of the original fable, but the previous Looney Tunes lampoons, this effort is a little more grounded than such Clampett monuments as "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery" and "The Big Snooze." As a result, it shows how the director, restrained from throwing out all the surrealistic stops, could channel his energy into a dizzyingly twisty plot.Above and beyond that, this cartoon is worth tracking down for Mel Blanc's masterful and startlingly moving voice performance. From Bugs' near-hysterical outburst as he realizes he's winning to his heartbreaking chastisement of his so-called supporters ("You FOOLS! You FOOLS! I'm the RABBIT!"), this cartoon, all on its own, demonstrates that Blanc's talent reached far deeper than a mere capacity for silly voices.