Eating a Drawing

Billy Boy eats the very paper he’s drawn on in his only cartoon.



Of course, the drawings are actually on cels, but the audience doesn’t know.

Ray Patterson, Mike Lah, Walt Clinton, Grant Simmons and Bob Bentley are the animators. Ed Benedict designed the wolf flat while the cutsy goat is more rounded.

The short was officially released May 8, 1954, though the Tivoli in Chattanooga first showed it on April 16th (the feature was Prince Valiant with James Mason, Janet Leigh and Robert Wagner). Several Interstate theatres in Texas also screened it before the official date (with Executive Suite, starring William Holden).

Avery and his unit had been gone from MGM for over a year at that point, but you can see he got some credit in the print ad to the right for a theatre in Fort Worth. Another ad in the Fort Worth Star-Tribune proclaimed it “1954’s Best Cartoon.” An ad in the Reidsville Review called it “The Most Talked Of Cartoon Ever Shown On Our Screen.” As Reidsville is in North Carolina, and Daws Butler was doing a North Carolina accent for the wolf, that is perhaps not a surprise. The Motion Picture Exhibitor rated the cartoon "excellent."

Avery employed a tape-loop effect on the wolf’s dialogue. If Avery ever explained why he did it, and only in this cartoon, I’ve never seen the reason.