Fantastic!

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Friz Freleng's 'Pigs is Pigs' is an odd cartoon that starts out unbearably cutesy and then suddenly turns nightmarish. The story of a greedy little pig who falls foul of a mad scientist, 'Pigs is Pigs' starts out looking saccharine sweet and torturously slow paced as young pigs frolic in a brightly coloured garden. However, there's an inspired little scene in which the main pig steals spaghetti from the others and from here the cartoon picks up. The incongruous pairing of the overly cute characters and cloying voice characterisations with the disturbing latter half of the cartoon only serves to make that second half even more freaky. A strange yellow scientist force feeds the pig by strapping him to a chair that keeps his mouth open and firing various foods into it. All the best jokes emerge during this frightening sequence but the pacing still feels a little too slow and ultimately, 'Pigs is Pigs' is an interesting failure. It's definitely worth seeing but in the end it's a less than satisfying watch, despite the refreshing surprise that in a seemingly didactic cartoon the lead character learns absolutely nothing!

This was an early animated prototype of Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" (which, btw, was released not in the late '60s, but in the early70s, and coincidentally it was the first of his pernament Warner Bros.Studio association!)Other toons used this gimmick too. MGM's "Pipe Dreams" Warner's own "Wholly Smoke" Art Clokey's "Grub Grabber Gumby!"Billy Bletcher was the villain, the very obscure Bernice Hansen, the little pig. The title was the only thing from that 1905 E.P.Butlerbook,"Pigs is Pigs", with a very different storyline than the WB cartoon, but Disney made a film twenty years later of the Butler book. WB was indeed the most cynical of the studios till Jay Ward,Hanna Barbera, then Spumco in the 90s.Soundtrack includes "Fella with a Fiddle" and "When My Dreaboat Comes Home", also much used in WB shorts of the time-"Fella" in "The Cat Came Back", "The Blow-Out",the title short "Fella", and "Little Beau Porky",and "Dreamboat" in "Porky's Badtime Story", and its remake "Tick Tock Tuckered",and "The Birth of a Notion".When the mother pig (talking in a Jewish accent--VERY sneaky WB type joke even for that un-PC period!) (as we see the outside shot of the piggie house!) warns her sonny-boy of indigestion, WE know he might have some nightmare, especially when he finds himself in a different place all of a sudden, especially when a Billy Bletcher-voiced mad doctor appears! But is it a dream, reality, or is it Memorex?(Compare this with PORKY's shorts, or more recent live action comedies about fatness--"Big Momma's House 1 and 2", and this year's smashes "Norbit" and "Hairspray"! (and that last was set back in the sixties..)The ending, like the "A Clockwork Orange" gimmick,is like "Wholly Smoke" (same director,Frank Tash), which DID have Porky.

Despite what the title may imply, "Pigs Is Pigs" does not star Porky Pig. Rather, it features a young swine with an appetite more insatiable than John Belushi's character in "Animal House". His mother repeatedly scolds him, but it does no good. So much so that he goes to another house where a deranged scientist force-feeds him more than any mere mortal can handle (but there's a surprise at the end).I would mostly say that this cartoon seemed like a place holder in between the really great cartoons (Daffy Duck debuted three months after this came out). But make no mistake about it, they do some neat things here. The whole force-feeding sequence looks more relevant today, given the obesity epidemic overtaking our country.Anyway, not the greatest cartoon, but worth seeing.

The Warner Brothers cartoon 'Pigs Is Pigs' takes its title from a best-selling humour book by Ellis Parker Butler, but is not otherwise related to that book. (In fact, the 'pigs' in Butler's book are guinea pigs.)This very funny cartoon is about a little-boy pig (not Porky) who lives with his young siblings and their mother. (There doesn't seem to be a father pig in this family, so who brings home the bacon?) There are several spot gags dealing with the gluttonous Piggy stealing his siblings' dinners as well as scoffing his own.Eventually he leaves home and finds himself at the door of a mad scientist (with an elaborate hiccough) who invites Piggy in for some free food. Which, indeed, he gets. But the mad scientist is testing a contraption that resembles the feeding machine in Chaplin's 'Modern Times', only it's more aggressive. The scientist straps Piggy into the machine, which then proceeds to force-feed him huge amounts of food. We get a variation of Friz Freleng's 'Hold the Onions' gag, which showed up in several Freleng toons. At the climax of the story, there's a very impressive montage as the scientist ratchets up the action. When he's finished, he laughs evilly as Piggy finds himself swollen to gargantuan girth. (Great voice work as the scientist by Billy Bletcher, better known for the voice of Paw Bear in some later Warners toons.)SPOILER COMING. Warner Bros were the most cynical movie studio, and 'Pigs Is Pigs' follows the same pattern as several other Warners cartoons - including 'Now that Summer Is Gone' and 'I Wanna Be a Sailor' - in which a little-boy animal with a moral failing (in this case, gluttony) is taught a lesson and appears to repent but then (hilariously) proves he has no intention of reforming. In the case of 'Pigs Is Pigs', the whole ordeal turns out to be a nightmare ... and of course Piggy hasn't really learnt his lesson.Kids and adults will both get a laugh out of this toon. 'Pigs Is Pigs' is also interesting for another reason, and from here on this review is adults-only. At approximately age eight, a boy named Bob Flanagan was profoundly impressed by 'Pigs Is Pigs'. Flanagan had cystic fibrosis, and he had to be repeatedly spanked on his chest by an adult in order to clear out his fibrotic tissues. The sadomasochistic aspects of 'Pigs Is Pigs' (bondage, forced feeding, forced body modification, experiments on an unwilling subject) had a highly erotic effect on young Bob, who developed at an early age an interest in masochism. Bob Flanagan grew up to be the adult subject of the 1997 documentary 'Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist'. In his performance pieces, the adult Flanagan often paid tribute to 'Pigs Is Pigs' and its early influence on him. Several of the Warners cartoons by Bob Clampett have extreme fetish content, so it's intriguing to know that somebody found fetish content in a cartoon by the more staid Freleng. I'll rate 'Pigs Is Pigs' 9 out of 10. Don't worry, parents: this cartoon won't turn your kids into Bob Flanagan.