Tex Avery was the most successful at exploiting the visual aspects of animation to create his own physical reality as well as exaggerate. Walt Disney's aim was to push the medium as a storytelling device where the characters lived and breathed, and the visual comedy always took a backseat to technical craft. Avery's predecessors at Warner Bros. rarely cared about gags and relied on musical themes and song-and-dance numbers and occasionally sprinkled their cartoons with impossible imagery that just sort of happened without any reason. As for his contemporaries at Warner Bros. and MGM, Clampett, Jones, Freleng, and Hanna-Barberra rivaled him in creativity but not spirit.

What's that spirit exactly? Avery's cartoons are a full-on burst of spontaneity. It would be wrong to say Avery had the monopoly on visual gags; a high percentage of course, but even early Harman and Ising cartoons occasionally had visuals that would go toe-to-toe with his, to say nothing of Jones and Clampett.

His gags psyche you for the next one. They don't lag with any scenes of "story development" or "show off animation", every day and night it's gag gag gag gag gag gag gag. Clampett's gags communicated the emotions of his characters, Avery's characters were thrown into this world he created where the laws of physics are rewritten to suit his tastes, where they can only deal with the situation thrust upon them. And yet the players seem to enjoy themselves and face their world with a sense of curiosity, and while it's mischevious, violent, and with reckless abandon, it's never cruel.

Avery's cartoons express the joy of being able to split in five parts, shatter into pieces of glass, touch the ceiling with their arms, grab someone else's head and put it on theirs, lose their whole middle section, kick their own head, walk on air, reach far, far underground, show up in places they could not have reached, and change into an unrelated object, most of these fatal or impossible in the real world, all of them played out as Avery experienced them in his own head.

A dialogue gag in an Avery cartoon is rare, rather the characters discuss what they're going through in a surrendering fashion, prepared to play out their roles just to get it over with. And need I say it, the visuals are not there for their own sake but seem to be planned out in order of intensity or let down for the next outburst.

The designs, more striking sometimes than others, the animation, gorgeous but rarely standing out, and the characters, be they personalities or gag foils, are subserviant to communicating the sheer joy that Avery can do anything with the world in his hands. And yet he could have gone Clampett's route if he wanted - He's suceeded with characterization in several cartoons even if the characters were slaves to their environment and with the expert animators he has worked with, from Robert McKimson to Preston Blair, he could wow you with the animation. Yet he chose to keep the unimportant stuff in the rear and put the entertainment up front. Avery's cartoons make something that might have been on the spur of the moment THE moment, doing it not because he can but because he must. His cartoons are not films as much as they are a force of nature.