Chuck Jones' Inki cartoons are rarely seen these days, because Inki is a small, stereotyped Hottentot with a bone in his hair, and we have come to see such images as racist and demeaning. Here, on exhibit in a circus and deviled by two dogs, one of whom would be developed into the high-pressure Charlie Dog of half a dozen cartoons, Inki is pursued and bedeviled -- and pursues and bedevils the dogs.
But Inki, although the protagonist in these movies, is not the key character. The real star is probably the greatest of the Warner Brothers characters, a black mynah bird who has the best entrances in the business -- here he bursts out of a heavy safe -- and who walks, hunched over, through the cartoons with a stuttering, hopping step, underscored by Sibelius to a jazz beat. And whenever the mynah bird appears, so does chaos, because he's getting where he's going no matter what you do. The mynah is the trickster, even more than Bugs Bunny's take on Rabbit. In some ways he is a precursor on the Roadrunner, but much purer and funnier. The Roadrunner takes pleasure in the Coyote's failure. The mynah doesn't care.
It is a pity that he was always paired with Inki, because this makes him obscure -- the only other time I have seen him appear is in a meaningless turn in one of the Tweety-Sylvester mysteries that the Cartoon Network ran about the turn of the millennium. But these movies do turn up occasionally, if maddeningly infrequently. If you have a chance to see one, don't miss it.