The Eternal Pursuit: Looney Tunes, Postmodernism, and “Little Red Riding Hood”

Logan Metz Prof. Armando Maggi Renaissance and Baroque Fairy Tales 17 March 2015 The Eternal Pursuit: Looney Tunes, Postmodernism, and “Little Red Riding Hood” “Really you cannot tempt me with your soft words and sweet music. Now I must be on my way to my grandmother’s, and I’m perfectly capable of traveling alone.

Now scram, Romeo, scram.”

- Red, “Little Red Walking Hood,” 1937 I. Introduction – “Ironic Distance” The role of fairy tales in the postmodern era has been the subject of much discussion in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Somewhere between the publication of the 1812 Brothers Grimm collection and the dawning of the Disney-era, specific versions of fairy tales, contrary to their evolutionary nature, became formally crystallized in the modern psyche.

Countless tales, whose very creation was a function of the essential fluidity and mutability of folklore, slowly congealed into sanctioned, singular, “correct” and “finished” versions of themselves. Perhaps this crystallization can be attributed to a modern shift in cultural value from the spoken to the written word, or it may simply be an effect of the commoditization of storytelling, but at a certain point in recent history, fairy tales moved from representing the common human experience, to being that common experience. In the words of Jessica Tiffin, the twentieth century’s appropriation of the fairy tale “has perhaps blunted its aspect of communal ownership…but it has simultaneously ensured that the process of communal

Metz 2 experience is enabled.”1 To the modern ear, then, “Once upon a time” no longer refers to an age long ago when the content of fairy tales was real, but to an age when people actually told such tales. “Once upon a time there was a king…” now implicitly means, “Once upon a time there was a story which began: ‘Once upon a time there was a king…’” The characteristic of fairy tales under postmodernism, then, is extranarrativity—the story now comes in a frame, from which it cannot be removed.

It is natural, then, that another term often associated with the contemporary representation of fairy tales is “self-consciousness.” Postmodern versions of fairy tales must publicly admit that they are responses to a closed genre. They maintain a “textual stance of ironic distance”2 from their sources, designed to affirm the “reality” of their own narratives via the explicit juxtaposition to the “fiction” of traditional ones. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber is a sublime example of this narrative self-awareness. The title story is an adaptation of the tale of Bluebeard, in which the female protagonist and narrator seems somehow aware of the original tale upon which her own is based. At the climax of the tale, she overtly compares her murderous husband to one of “those clockwork tableaux of Bluebeard that you see in glass cases at the fair.”3 In this way the postmodern fairy tale often explicitly acknowledges the world of fairy tale, while asserting itself in meta-fictional binary opposition to it.

But in fact, it may even be too generous to say that those fairy tales that have lasted into the modern age can rightly be called “tales” at all. For even the “authorized” versions of these stories have been reduced beyond narrativity. What we have inherited are not the tales

1

Tiffin, Jessica. Marvelous Geometry: Narrative and Metafiction in Modern Fairy Tale.

(Wayne State University Press, Detroit MI 2009), p. 219.

2 Ibid. p. 224 3 Carter, Angela The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. (Penguin Books, New York, NY 1993), p. 40.

Metz 3 themselves, but a collection of images, symbols, props and archetypes—not narratives, but, as Christina Bacchilega calls them, “stereotyped and institutionalized fragments” of narratives4: a glass slipper, a basket of goodies, a gingerbread house, a big bad wolf, a wicked stepmother, a resurrective kiss. Is there child alive who has experienced a fairy tale purely and directly, before or without being familiar with its postmodern adaptations and parodies?

What is the cultural force, then, that has escorted us into the current “age of parody”? A fundamental mistrust of magic? An irresistible curiosity to discover the truth behind illusion?

Whatever the cause, we have committed the same irreversible act of discovery that tempted Pandora, Psyche, and Bluebeard’s wife. Bacchilega, conjuring another female disenchanter, states that we have “Look[ed] with Dorothy behind the curtain at Oz to investigate the mechanisms of enchantment.”5 We cannot un-know the architecture, the social ideologies, the “tricks” that fairy tales play on us. We are not fooled by their illusions anymore, for we have exposed their wires and trap doors, their smoke and mirrors. No longer content with simply knowing that we are enchanted, critics, scholars, psychoanalysts and readers have asked why we are enchanted, and (for better or worse) they have done a remarkably thorough job coming up with answers. Perhaps this literal disenchantment is what underlies Walter Benjamin’s famous claim that “the art of storytelling is coming to an end.”6 According to Bacchilega, “what distinguishes the tale of magic or fairy tale as a genre… is its effort to conceal its ‘work’ systematically—to naturalize its artifice.” As mentioned earlier, one strategy to regain this naturalization of wonder under postmodernism is to include the old 4

Bacchilega, Cristina. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA, 1999), p. 2.

5 Ibid. p. 6.

6 Benjamin, Walter. The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov. From Hale, Dorothy J, Ed. The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900-2000, (Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA. 2006), p. 362.

Metz 4 tales within the new. The new tale’s artifice is naturalized via the re-artificialization of the old tale. Postmodern renditions of fairy tales deliberately direct our attention to their ancestors, thereby “concealing their own work” in plain sight; as readers who are “in on the joke,” we are so amused by the obvious fiction of the old tale, that we inadvertently affirm the “reality” (however outrageous) of the new. Misdirection—the oldest trick in the book.

One twentieth-century site of fairy tale appropriation that brilliantly and effectively employs this strategy of naturalization-of-the-self via artificialization-of-the-other is the world of Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes7. This essay will analyze four versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” (one of the most “institutionalized and fragmented” tales of all) as adapted by Looney Tunes in the so-called “Golden Age” of American animation, from the late-1930s through the mid-‘50s. I will examine the various ways in which these cartoons adapt the Perrault and Brothers Grimm versions of “Red Riding Hood” in a postmodern context, and how their various storytelling techniques, especially the Brechtian razing of the “fourth wall,” can help us understand the meaning of the fairy tale in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But first, to fully grasp Looney Tunes’ treatment of narrative style, feminine subjectivity, meta-theatrics, and sexuality in “Red Riding Hood,” let us briefly revisit the “original” versions of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm.

7

I am using the term “Looney Tunes” rather more broadly than I should. Technically, only “Red Riding Hoodwinked” is a Looney Tunes production. Both “Little Red Walking Hood” and “Little Red Riding Rabbit” are Merrie Melodies, Warner Brothers’ scarcely distinguishable sister program to Looney Tunes. More importantly, however, “Red Hot Riding Hood” was directed by Tex Avery under MGM Studios a year after he left Warner Brothers (Avery is credited with the creation of many Looney Tunes’ most beloved characters, including Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig). For simplicity, I am using Looney Tunes as a general term to describe the collective work of a more or less consistent team of creative minds, including Avery, Leon Schlesinger, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng and Chuck Jones.

Metz 5 II. “My, What Varying Conclusions You Have!”

The story of “Little Red Riding Hood,” perhaps not surprisingly, seems to have remained relatively consistent in the century and a half that passed between Charles Perrault’s 1697 version and the final edition of the Grimm Brothers’ “Little Red Cap.” Certain differences stand out: Perrault’s tale takes place entirely between two villages, while the Grimms move both the Wolf and Grandmother’s House into the forest; in Perrault, Red’s tarrying is a natural function of her youth, while in Grimm, her flower-gathering is a result of the Wolf’s calculated persuasion; Perrault places Red naked in bed with the Wolf, while the Brothers Grimm prudently clothe her and place her beside it. These differences are certainly significant, and have been subject to scholarly inquiry aplenty (Bruno Bettelheim in particular spends a good deal of time discussing the sexual implications of Red’s willingness to “dally”8), but by far the most important narrative difference is the discrepancy between the two tales’ respective dénouements.

Perrault concludes his tale abruptly, just after the Wolf’s famous response to Red’s observation about the size of his teeth: “And upon saying these words, the wicked wolf pounced on Little Red Riding Hood and ate her up.”9 A rhymed moral follows, which explicitly informs the reader that the Wolf of the tale is a metaphor for the lecherous man, and that young children, “especially pretty girls…should stay on guard against all sorts of men.” The Brothers Grimm, on the other hand, continue the tale to its more common redemptive conclusion, beyond the deaths of Red and Grandmother. A huntsman10 arrives and, hearing the Wolf snoring in post-prandial (or post-coital) bliss, he enters Grandmother’s House and slices open the comatose villain, 8

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales.

(Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, NY 1976), pp. 171-2.

9 All quotes from Perrault and Brothers Grimm come from: Zipes, Jack. The Great Fairy Tale Tradition. (Norton & Company, New York, NY, 2001), pp. 744-750.

10 According to Zipes, in 1800, Ludwig Tieck “was the first to introduce a hunter who saves Red Cap’s life” (Ibid., 744).

Metz 6 freeing Red and Grandmother. Red then fills the Wolf’s belly with stones, the trio sews him up, and upon waking and trying to escape, the Wolf collapses and dies.

It hardly bears mentioning that the tale acquires vastly different meanings depending on the ending we subscribe to. For the directly opposing accounts of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm are by no means the only options, but rather represent two ends of a spectrum—on the one end, the hero wins; on the other, the villain. The variations in between are virtuously innumerable. Notwithstanding the Grimms’ strange and largely forgotten epilogue (in which Red encounters yet another wolf and proceeds, with the help of Grandmother, to lure him to his death with a pungent trough of sausage-water), other versions may have Red escaping on her own, killing the huntsman, being killed by the huntsman, marrying the huntsman, seducing the Wolf herself, etc.11 Accordingly, interpretations of the tale are as diverse as its conclusions. Is it an allegory of sexual maturation or cautionary fable about trusting strangers? Does it recount the rape of a virgin or the Oedipal development of a woman? Is the red cap a symbol of menstruation or bourgeois ambition? Does Red’s plight endorse female domination of the male Wolf, or female submission to the male huntsman?

The purpose of this section is not to seek answers to these questions with yet another critical interpretation of the tale. I mean instead to point out that the tale’s proneness to be endlessly interpreted owes no small debt to the fact that, despite its being one of the most deeply ingrained stories of all time, there is not, and apparently never has been, a “correct” conclusion.

The crucial elements of the tale’s retelling have been reduced to the color of Red’s cloak, her errand to Grandmother’s House, and the bedside conversation involving the size of the Wolf’s various body parts. What happens after “The better to eat you with” is permanently and 11

For more on the tale’s many variations, see Jack Zipes’ The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood.

Metz 7 endlessly variable. This fact makes “Little Red Riding Hood” especially conducive to postmodern adaptations and parodies, which brings us at last to the primary object of this study.

III. “You Wolves are All Alike” So far, we have examined the frame of self-consciousness that is necessarily characteristic of fairy tales’ postmodern retellings, and one possible reason why “Little Red Riding Hood” is a particularly rich source for adaptation and parody. Let us now focus our attention on four specific examples of “Red Riding Hood” as the tale appears in the world of Looney Tunes. Generally, these cartoons employ two distinct approaches to the role of the Wolf and his motivating desire. He is either cast unambiguously as a sexual predator motivated by lust, or as a self-aware commedia dell’arte-style “Big Bad Wolf” stock character, motivated by some combination of a literal hunger for Red, and a seemingly genuine desire to “do his job” as a fairy tale villain. Into these two roughly hewn categories we divide the four animated short films involved in this study: in the former we place “Little Red Walking Hood” (1937) and “Red Hot Riding Hood” (1943); in the latter, “Little Red Riding Rabbit” (1944) and “Red Riding Hoodwinked” (1955).12

A. “Little Red Walking Hood” (1937) This early Warner Brothers production begins with a device used by many cartoon fairy tale adaptations (including Disney’s); the first thing we see is the animated opening of a book.

This embedded framing tactic immediately establishes the “ironic distance” so characteristic of postmodernism. We are not simply watching a cartoon; we are watching a cartoon tell a pre12

Henceforth these titles will be abbreviated, “Walking Hood,” “Red Hot,” “Riding Rabbit,” and “Hoodwinked,” respectively.

Metz 8 written story. As we shall see, this is only the first of many ways in which “Walking Hood” places its characters on the same plane of reality as its audience. The film incessantly reminds us that the characters (especially Red) are well aware of their own narrative roles in an established cliché.

The title page of the “framing storybook” device reads:

Once upon a time, while Little Red Riding Hood was carrying a basket of lunch to Grandma’s house, the Mean Old Wolf was lurking in a nearby pool hall.

It is worth noting that in this version, the Wolf is the main subject of the first sentence. The film opens with the Wolf, in a blue sport coat, vest, tie, and boutonniere, cheating at pinball. The first we see of Red is her head passing by the pool hall window. Her body is deliberately concealed from the audience’s view; at this point in the film, we do not yet know the stage of Red’s sexual maturity. It is only when the Wolf jumps into a giant yellow phallus of an automobile, thus beginning his low-speed pursuit of the young heroine, that we perceive the entire object of his desire [right] and just how sexually ambiguous she is. She is quite young, certainly pre-pubescent, but carries herself with a very mature and lady-like gait; she wears a little girl’s light blue frock, but sports bright red lipstick. When we first hear her speak in response to the Wolf’s oily overture (“Hello, pretty girl. Going my way babe?”), the timbre of her voice surprises us. It is no childish squeak, but a refined, Hepburnesque purr. She turns directly to the “camera” and says,

Metz 9 “Really, in this modern age of flaming youth, a girl has to put up with such embarrassing situations. Really, we do, don’t we girls? Two-thirds of you girls out there have gone through just what I’m going through now. You know how it is, don’t you girls?”

However old she is, she is already sexually and narratively aware enough to have internalized Perrault’s warning, and assumes that the female viewers of “this modern age” have as well.

This moment when Red enlists the solidarity of her female audience members is the first of many in the film in which the “fourth wall” is broken. As discussed in the first section of this study, this is the quintessential strategy of postmodern storytelling. By engaging the audience directly, Red posits two levels of reality: a higher level, of which she and we are a part, and a lower, embedded level, in which the tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” proceeds. The shockingly ironic effect of this technique is that in fracturing the plane of reality between Red and her story, it conflates that of Red and her audience; in effect, Red tricks us into granting her, a cartoon, as much “reality” as we ourselves can claim. This is postmodern enchantment at its finest.

This is but the first of several meta-theatrical interventions in “Walking Hood.” When the Wolf arrives at Grandmother’s House, the old women suspends the slapstick chase scene to answer the phone and order groceries (which include a case of gin); she promptly and willingly resumes the commotion as soon as she hangs up. When Red finally arrives and perfunctorily recites a brilliant parodic variation of her bedside lines (“What a large schnozola13 you have”), the ensuing commotion, during which Red would traditionally be devoured, is interrupted three times: first, for Red to turn to the audience and say “Rather silly way to make a living, don’t you think?”; next, for the realistic silhouettes of late-arriving audience members to shuffle in and take 13

Curiously, these animated versions almost unanimously include the nose in Red’s anatomical index of the Wolf, which appears neither in the Perrault nor the Brothers Grimm versions.

Metz 10 their seats [below]; and finally, for a character by the name of Egghead,14 who has mutely and inexplicably been whistling his way through certain scenes throughout the film, to announce “I’m the hero in this picture,” and vanquish the Wolf with the cartoon world’s weapon of choice, a giant wooden mallet.

Aside from the relentless reminders that the characters of the film are “in on the joke,” it is important to note that the narrative breaks down just before the bedroom consumption/consummation scene that is so essential to the traditional tale. As we shall see, any promise of narrative conclusion in Looney Tunes is usurped by a slapstick chase sequence. The fact that these versions of “Red Riding Hood” tale never quite end, but rather collapse into a chase scene, is the underlying idea behind the “eternal pursuit” of this paper’s title. I believe this anticlimactic narrative collapse bears special significance towards our understanding of fairy tales in the postmodern age.

B. “Red Hot Riding Hood” (1943) This short film is the source of arguably the most famous version of the cartoon wolflecher. Like “Walking Hood,” this short film is framed by the opening image of a book, once again asserting the ironic distance between the new medium and the old—the commentator and the commented-upon. The film begins with an androgynous and conspicuously facetious voice of a narrator: “Good evening, kiddies! Once upon a time, Little Red Riding Hood was skipping through the woods…” The voice proceeds to introduce the characters and set up the familiar

14

Tradition has it that Egghead is a prototype of the character Elmer Fudd.

Metz 11 premise of the tale: Red is on her way to deliver a basket of goodies to Grandmother. But when the narrator arrives at the Wolf, the villain interrupts his own introduction and accosts the narrator. “Oh, stop it!” he shouts, throwing his hat to the ground, “…I’m fed up with that sissy stuff. It’s the same old story over and over. If you can’t do this thing a new way, bud, I quit!”

The rest of the characters agree, and proceed to strike against the traditional tale. The narrator concedes to tell the tale in a “new way,” and another title card comes up, this time displaying in electric neon, “Red Hot Riding Hood.”

The new tale begins in Los Angeles, at the famous intersection of Hollywood and Vine.

The tuxedoed Wolf cruises along in an absurdly long phallic limousine, tipping his top hat and howling at women. Grandmother lives in the penthouse suite of a high-rise apartment building, beneath a gigantic neon sign that reads “Grandma’s Joint: come up and see me sometime,” with a suggestive beckoning neon finger. When we first see her, she is reclined on a chaise longue smoking a cigarette and wearing a red dress that leaves little to the imagination (the sexualization of Grandmother, as we shall see, is a theme that ends up entirely dominating this story). Red works as a stripper in a Hollywood Nightclub that advertises “30 Gorgeous Girls!” Unlike the Wolf and Grandmother, however, who are the same animated characters as in the frame bit (only in different clothes), Red is a completely different drawing altogether. The younger, prepubescent Red vanishes from the film, and is replaced by an older, sexualized version of herself.15 In the scene that follows, which was destined to become an iconic moment in American animation, the Wolf sits at a cocktail table drinking, while Red takes the stage. She tosses away

15

See the Appendix for a comparison of two sets of characters.

Metz 12 her basket, hood and cape to reveal a very revealing red strapless dress, and begins to perform.16 As soon Red discards these symbols of the “old tale,” and along with them her sexual innocence, the Wolf stiffens into a levitating “full-body erection”17 with a cartoon “boing” [below, left], and proceeds to fall into a mad paroxysm of desire. He howls, whistles, and pounds the table with his fist in a not-so-subtle sexual motion. In a play on the “What big eyes you have” motif, the eyes of the symbolic male lecher expand and bug out, physically taking on the shape of the breasts at which he leers [below, right].

After this classic depiction of male voyeurism, the Wolf whisks Red back to his table and attempts to woo her. Despite her professional identity as a sexual object, however, offstage Red seems uninterested in male sexuality, sighing, “You wolves are all alike. Really you are,” in the same sultry Katherine Hepburn voice as the protagonist of “Walking Hood.” She breaks a lamp over the Wolf’s head and speeds off in a taxi, claiming to be going to Grandmother’s House. But that is the last we see of her. For the second time, Red disappears from the narrative to be replaced by an older version of herself, one with a very different sexual identity.

16

While the purpose of this study is not to provide a psychoanalytic account of Red’s oedipal desires, it is certainly worth noting that the song she sings is entitled “Daddy.”

17 Orenstein, Catherine. Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked. (Basic Books, New York, NY, 2002), p. 113.

Metz 13 The Wolf dashes up to “Grandmother’s Joint,” but instead of finding Red there, he finds her sex-crazed Grandmother (also clad in bright red). In a striking reversal of the typical chase sequence, it is Grandmother who pursues the Wolf, with a sexual fervor to rival his own. In terms of her sexuality, then, the figure of Red is cast in three ways in this film: as the nonsexual child of the frame story, as the seductive but impenetrable object of male desire, and as her opposite, the insatiable hysteric.

Eventually, the Wolf falls out of Grandmother’s high-rise window and ends up back at Red’s nightclub, evidently so traumatized by the experience that he vows to change his libidinous ways. “I’m through with women,” he tells us, “why, I’ll kill myself before I even look at another babe!” Red then takes the stage again, and the Wolf makes good on his word. He produces a pistol in each hand, and, playing the huntsman, shoots himself in the head and dies.

But the tale does not end there. The Wolf’s ghost then rises from his X-eyed corpse, and resumes the table-pounding sexual frenzy from before. Like “Walking Hood,” “Red Hot Riding Hood” denies itself a conclusion, and opts instead for the narrative to collapse into a series of circular chases. No one is eaten, no one is saved; in the postmodern age, not even the death of the Wolf can bring the story to an end.

C. “Little Red Riding Rabbit” (1944) “Red Hot Riding Hood” seems to have conquered the cartoon Wolf-as-lecher device, for after 1943, the tendency in animated “Little Red Riding Hood” adaptations is to present the Wolf as motivated either by mere physical hunger, or a self-aware, almost Shakespearean drive to “do his job” as a stock villain (or both). The role of Red swings in the same direction of storybook cliché and character self-consciousness. In fact, a year after “Red Hot” was released, Warner

Metz 14 Brothers came out with “Little Red Riding Rabbit,” which goes to great lengths to un-sexualize Red and resituate her in the context of the traditional tale. The Red of this version seems to be a direct response to the erotic dancer of “Red Hot.” Physically, her body is exactly the same, but the red dress has been replaced an ill-fitting child’s costume; the blue-shadowed come-hither eyes and voluptuous red lips of “Red Hot” are countered by giant spectacles and an overbite in “Riding Rabbit”; the dainty high heels are kicked off in favor of enormous tennis shoes; and most apparent of all, the sophisticated Katherine Hepburn voice is now an ear-splitting, lisped shriek, insufferable even to the film’s other characters.

Though this version has no storybook frame, the idea that we are knowingly operating within a pre-told story is nevertheless made clear. When the Wolf arrives at Grandmother’s House, for instance, he is met by a note on the door informing him that Grandmother is out “working the swing shift at Lockheed.” He lets himself inside and creeps to the bed, where he finds three identical wolves (and one tiny wolf underneath the pillow) already waiting for Red. “Come on, come on, take a powder!” our Wolf orders, “This is my racket!”18 Amusing as this absurdist gag may be on a surface level, it has real significance in terms of positing a postmodern landscape, for it implies that the tale is in a perpetual state of being told; the story we are watching is but one of infinite parallel retellings happening simultaneously.

It is important to note that the Wolf in this adaptation has absolutely no interest in either sleeping with or eating Red. His singular goal is to devour the gift that Red has brought for her Grandmother, namely Bugs Bunny. The chase in this version, therefore, which takes place between Bugs and the Wolf, draws the tale away from the implied bestiality of “Red Hot,”

18

Eight years later Warner Brothers would recycle this very same gag, right down to the tiny duplicate hiding beneath the pillow, in yet another “Red Riding Hood” adaptation, “Little Red Rodent Hood” (1952).

Metz 15 towards a more “natural” world in which wolves eat rabbits. Red, however, insists on “saying her lines,” and carrying the story through to its traditional conclusion (whether she is expecting the Perraultian or Grimmian conclusion, we cannot say). She persistently and obliviously interrupts the chase, screaming, “Hey Grandma!” and awkwardly spitting out variations of “What big eyes, ears, nose, teeth…” etc. At last, when Bugs (perhaps playing the huntsman) has trapped the Wolf in a very precarious physical position [below], Red’s obnoxious interruptions become too much for him. He tells us, the audience, “I’ll do it, but I’ll probably hate myself in the morning,” and proceeds to swap the positions of the Wolf and Red.

To read the suggestive physicality of this film’s denouement as the sexual punishment of Red, perhaps for her insistence that the Wolf carry out his role as seducer, is probably going too far.

But the conclusion of this parodic version certainly works to distance the “new world” of Looney Tunes from the “sissy stuff” of the traditional tale, thereby enticing the audience identify Bugs, a talking cartoon rabbit, as “more real” than Red.

D. “Red Riding Hoodwinked” (1955) Lastly and briefly, I would like to look at “Red Riding Hoodwinked,” a dual-plot adaptation of the tale. This version employs many of the same postmodern fairy tale elements we have been examining: the story is framed by a narrator who begins “Once upon a time…”;

Metz 16 the Wolf is self-aware, and upon his introduction he breaks the fourth wall with “Alright, alright, they know who I am”; Red recites a variation of the eyes-ears-teeth exchange; the encounter at Grandmother’s House culminates in a slapstick chase sequence, and so on. Aside from the fact that there is a parallel subplot (in which Sylvester the Cat plays the Wolf and Tweety Bird plays Red), this film is worth noting because of the deliberate discrepancy in animation styles between the two tales. Red and Grandmother19 are drawn in a nostalgic storybook style, quite distinct from the classic Looney Tunes artwork. Perhaps it would belabor the point to suggest that this is yet another instance of Looney Tunes’ mastery of the magic of postmodern enchantment; by artificializing the traditional tale, the cartoon once again “naturalizes its own artifice.”

IV: Conclusion: “That’s (not) All Folks!”

As we have seen, each of the short films involved in this study employ their own clever ways of distancing themselves from the embedded fairy tales they adapt. Using meta-theatrical devices like the self-aware villain, the breaking of the “fourth wall,” and the story-within-a-story, each of these cartoons establish a sharp metaphysical division between the “fictional” world of the traditional fairy tale, and the “real” world of the Looney Tunes. By posing this dichotomy, these films level their own plane of reality with that of their audience. We laugh along with Red at the Wolf (or with Bugs, at Red, whatever the case may be). In this way, Looney Tunes “conceals its work,” naturalizing its own mad world in the mind of the audience by directing attention away from its own artifice, towards that of fairy tales.

19

In this tale, the Wolf kicks Grandmother out of her house in lieu of devouring her. She vows revenge, (“One of these days… Pow! Right in the kisser!”), and eventually gets it when both “Wolves” unwittingly chase both “Reds” onto a bus driven by Grandmother.

Metz 17 But the most important commonality among these and other postmodern animated versions of “Little Red Riding Hood,” I believe, is their treatment of the tale’s conclusion, or lack thereof. As soon as the three main characters meet at Grandmother’s house, and the golden cue is recited (“The better to eat you with!”), the narrative falls apart. Grandmother and Red are never eaten, but simply chased, often (as we have seen) to no conclusive end. This tendency to avoid an ending may be attributable to the historical and cultural indecision regarding the story’s official denouement, which has afflicted the tale since its earliest versions. But if we read further into what it means that these parodies inevitably descend into a chase sequence instead of committing to one narrative conclusion or another, we reveal an important truth about fairy tales and how they live in the postmodern age. Paradoxically, the effect that the aforementioned “crystallization” has had on formerly malleable evolutionary narratives has not been to freeze the tales in a “finished” state. Quite the opposite is true. The institutionalization of certain tales in the modern psyche has caused them to be permanently unfinished and in fact unfinishable. They are in a state of perpetual motion—of always already being told. In Looney Tunes, the Wolf never devours Grandmother or Red, nor does the huntsman ever (permanently) kill the Wolf. In the postmodern age, it is impossible for the tale ever to be in a state of “told.” We cannot kill the Wolf, (nor, for that matter, Red, Grandmother, the Dragon, the Wicked Witch, the Evil Stepsister, etc.) for, as “Little Red Riding Rabbit” has shown us, there are always already infinite Wolves waiting in bed to perpetuate the eternal pursuit.

Metz 18 Appendix - Character Comparison RED

“Little Red Walking Hood” (1937)

“Red Hot Riding Hood” (1943)

“Little Red Riding Rabbit” (1944)

“Red Riding Hoodwinked” (1955)

WOLF

GRANDMA

HUNTSMAN (?)