The Wolf And The Lion

It's enough to make a cartoon lover's eyes bug out. About half of the 67 shorts in the laserdisc set The Compleat Tex Avery and most of the 70 cartoons in The Golden Age of Looney Tunes, Volume 3 are — aOOOga! — new to video and (for now, at least) exclusive to disc. Although these compilations aren't in CAV format, which means you can't freeze-frame or slo-mo the exploding animals unless you buy a player with pricy digital effects, the picture quality still makes tape look smeary by comparison.
Arranged chronologically, the nine-hour Compleat Tex Avery gives the silliest of material a suitably absurdist archival cachet. It actually catalogs only the director's years at MGM (Avery also worked at Warner Bros. and for Walter Lantz), but for his very best cartoons, this is one-stop shopping.

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There is something for everyone in this collection of Isabelle Aboulker's most beautiful melodies, released in Aboulker's 80th birth year and sung here by soprano Julia Kogan. The passionate vocalises of Je t'aime sit alongside limpid fables by La Fontaine (The Crow and the Fox, The Lion in Old Age and more), while the unnerving eeriness of the merchant of souls in Au Marche de Saint-Paul contrasts with the light humour of the Savoir-vivre cycle, and the melancholy accents of Lettre d'amour make way for the irresistible charm of L'Inconstante. Isabelle's prosodic clarity and voluptuous focus on the evocative power of words speak of a deep attachment to the legacy of French song composers. In turn impetuous or melancholy, this thrilling music knows how to aim straight for the heart.