(1908–80). American director Tex Avery worked with animated cartoons, primarily for the Warner Brothers and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studios. His films exhibited a love of exaggeration in his use of absurd gags presented at breakneck speed, and his modernist approach emphasized parody and satire.
Tex Avery was born Frederick Bean Avery on February 26, 1908, in Taylor, Texas. His only formal art training consisted of a three-month course at the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois during the late 1920s. Avery began his animation career in 1929 for cartoon producer Walter Lantz at Universal Studios. For the next six years he worked for Lantz and freelanced his drawing and gag-writing services to other studios.
In 1936 Avery was hired by Leon Schlesinger, the head of the Warner Brothers animation unit. Avery was put in charge of a team of animators that included such notable names in the field as Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett. Avery tried to make his cartoons the funniest and best-written in the business. He increased the pacing of the films and filled them with outrageous gags. He also redesigned Porky Pig—then the studio’s star character—and created Daffy Duck, whose personality of unmotivated insanity was unprecedented in cartoons. Most important, he gave a definitive personality to Bugs Bunny in his fifth film, A Wild Hare (1940), and was responsible for Bugs’s famous catchphrase, “What’s up, Doc?”
After a dispute with Schlesinger over the editing of the Bugs Bunny short Heckling Hare (1941), Avery left Warner Brothers and worked briefly for Paramount Pictures before being hired to head MGM’s animation unit in 1942. From 1942 to 1954 he created 67 cartoons for MGM, including Who Killed Who? (1943), Batty Baseball (1944), Screwball Squirrel (1944), and King-Size Canary (1947). A number of his films featured a curvy showgirl in fairy tales (Red Hot Riding Hood , Little Rural Riding Hood ), a paranoid wolf (Dumb-Hounded , Bad Luck Blackie ), or the slow-talking dog Droopy (Northwest Hounded Police , Droopy’s Good Deed ). In these films Avery explored themes such as survival, control, fear, and the film medium itself.
MGM eliminated Avery’s animation unit in 1954, and he spent most of the rest of his career directing television commercials. During the last two years of his life, he developed gags and characters for the Hanna-Barbera studio. Avery died on August 26, 1980, in Burbank, California.