King-Size Canary (1947)

People are voting emotionally.

It is a performances centric movie

A lot of fun.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

An alley cat is starving and does all he can to find food. Eventually, he breaks into a house and ransacks the contents of the kitchen. He finds a can of cat food, but upon opening it, he finds a mouse who talks him into letting him go, and tells him to eat the canary in the next room. Well, now comes the kicker. The cat finds a bottle of some growth substance. He pours it down the throat of the canary and the thing becomes enormous. Now the cat must drink the stuff and get bigger, followed by a dog, and finally the mouse. You get the point. I won't talk about the ending, but it's pretty much what you would expect from what has happened. We never really question the fact that such a substance exists. Tex Avery handles the expressions and the craziness just fine.

The Tex Avery cartoons at MGM are among the very best cartoon shorts ever made. Their insane sensibilities, irreverent attitude and silliness make them all timeless classics and KING-SIZE CANARY is certainly no exception.The film starts with a hungry cat looking for something to eat in the alley. He looks through binoculars at a house and spots a "Coldernell" refrigerator and figures he can get something to eat there. When he catches the mouse in the house, it tells him he'd read the script and the cat was supposed to eat the canary in the next room! But, when the cat sees that the bird is minuscule, he gets an idea and feeds it "Jumbo Gro" liquid. Now the canary is huge....so huge that the tables are now turned! Well, somehow the dog and mouse get involved and this Jumbo Gro is an amazing product--you take a swallow and almost instantly become huge--leading to a rather cute ending.The bottom line is that this cartoon isn't exactly "high art" but it's doggone funny. You'll laugh and have a great time, so give it a try today!

'King Size Canary' is one of MGM and Tex Avery's better animation shorts, and concentrates on what might happen if a hungry cat goes in search of food and finds a way to make everything larger! Of course this being cartoon fun you just know that whatever the cat makes larger will end up being too large, and that the gag will progress on and on to its inevitable conclusion. The main characters - cat, dog, bird and mouse - are funny and watchable; the animation is well drawn, and the cartoon is a diverting few minutes.Although MGM's cartoons, Hanna and Barbera aside, are not known as much as the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies of Warner Bros., or the shorts made by Walt Disney, they are not at all bad and can still be appreciated today by any generation.

While I do not personally think this is Avery's best cartoon (that honor goes to The Legend of Rockabye Point) and this one is also not among my personal favorites, this is the ultimate in Tex Avery cartoons. Everything Avery strived to do is here-he loved taking a quasi-normal situation, tossing in a random, improbable element or three and then piling sight gag after sight gag, each one more outlandish than the ones before. The jokes are all sight gags. What dialogue there is is generally there as necessary for set-up and only one or two lines are even mildly funny. Just sight gags, as far as the eye can see, fast enough to register, but so fast that you almost don't have time to breathe because you're laughing so hard. This one makes you want to do things like hang spoons from your nose! Wildly silly and unforgettable, truly a masterpiece. This is a great cartoon! It worked 55 years ago and it works today. You have to see this one. Most highly recommended.