Very well executed

Just so...so bad

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Porky Pig goes on a hunt to catch the surreally elusive last Do-Do bird.This cartoon has been credited as the 8th best cartoon ever made. I am not going to get into the minutia of deciding if it is better or worse than 8th, but it absolutely needs to be on that list, because it takes such a simple thing and makes it so strange.The way I saw this was side by side with "Dough for the Do-Do". You could watch them individually, but side by side will blow your mind. Almost all of the scenes are identical, though some of the backgrounds are colored differently. Saying one is better than the other is hard to do.

As I understand it, "Porky in Wackyland" was the first of three cartoons in which Porky Pig goes thither*, followed by "Tin Pan Alley Cats" and "Dough for the Do-Do" (which was almost a shot-for-shot remake of this one). In this one and the last one at least, he goes in search of the last Do-Do bird. But no matter what specifically we know about the cartoon's history, it's great to see just how outlandish the animators were willing to get. As the Wackyland sign indicates: "It can happen here." And believe you me, ANYTHING can happen there! And much of that happens even before we meet the zany Do-Do bird! Anyway, this is definitely a classic cartoon. I wholeheartedly recommend it.*"Thither" is Old English for "to there".

Wow! Over sixty years later, this cartoon short stands out as one of the greatest achievements in this medium. Bob Clampett, given the complete freedom that producer Leon Schlesinger let him have, spun out some of the weirdest and wackiest ever made.We start out with a typical beginning for that era, Porky Pig is flying to Darkest Africa to find the last Do-Do, worth billions. But what follows is a mind bending journey, where no one evidently studied the laws of physics. Some of the humor are stock Bob Clampett jokes that are repeated in others of his cartoons, but he was always best with visual humor, when he let the animation be the star of the show.

In 1937 Robert Clampett was promoted to director and one year later he created his first, true classic cartoon of the many that he would direct for Warner Bros. studio: Porky in Wackyland. Along with Tex Avery and Frank Tashlin, Clampett was instrumental in creating the Warner style. He was an innovator who liked to push the boundaries of the medium, and Wackyland is a perfect example of this. It was also the first of Clampett's many cartoons to use hallucinatory, surrealistic images; others would include The Great Piggy Bank Robbery, The Big Snooze and Tin Pan Alley Cats (which re-used animation from Porky in Wackyland.) Wackyland was later remade in color as Dough for the Do-Do by Friz Freleng.