| Louvre Come Back to Me! | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Chuck Jones Maurice Noble |
| Story by | John Dunn |
| Produced by | David H. DePatie |
| Starring | Mel Blanc Julie Bennett (uncredited) |
| Music by | Milt Franklyn |
| Animation by | Bob Bransford Ken Harris Tom Ray Richard Thompson Harry Love (uncredited) |
| Backgrounds by | Phillip DeGuard Tom O'Loughlin |
| Color process | Technicolor |
Production company | |
| Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
Release date |
|
Running time | 6:28 |
| Language | English |
Louvre Come Back to Me! is a 1962Warner Bros.Looney Tunescartoon directed byChuck Jones.[1] The short was released on August 18, 1962, and starsPepé Le Pew andPenelope Pussycat in their last cartoon of the "classic" Warner Bros. animation age.[2]
InParis,Pepé Le Pew is strolling and causing a disturbance with his fumes. At one pointPenelope Pussycat is walking with aginger cat and Pepé's stink causes the ginger cat to faint and Penelope to spring into the air in shock, her back making contact with a fresh white-painted flagpole before she falls right into Pepé's arms. As Pepé introduces himself, Penelope scurries away.
Pepé chases Penelope into theLouvre, with the ginger cat following. Pepé's stench ruins a couple of sculptures (correcting one into theVenus de Milo) as well as thwarting the ginger cat's ambush attempt (who Pepé mistakes for a sculpture due to him turning white; the cat's teeth, whiskers, tail, and nose fall off, which, after briefly fleeing, he comes back to sweep up before slinking off again) and he terrifies Penelope in the sculpture gallery, even as he paints a picture of her ("Don't move, darling. I want to remember you just as you are."), she scurries away again and Pepé "accidentally" paints the dust cloud she left onto his picture ("Aw, shucks...You moved!").
The ginger cat then pumps himself with air in an attempt to simultaneously look strong and muscular and hold his breath while he confronts Pepé. Pepé plays along with the confrontation as a duel, miming a miss and a defeat. The ginger cat in the meantime slowly suffocates and finally, the air he fights very hard to hold in is forced out, launching himself into the Hall d'Armour and trapping himself in a suit of armor. Pepé wonders where everyone has gone to and after remarking that "War is fine, but love is better", he immediately picks up on where Penelope went.
Pepé finds Penelope hiding in the air conditioning machine below the Louvre and, thinking she had found a trysting place for them, traps her in it with himself. Pepé's fumes spread through the Louvre spoiling various works of art (the limp watches onSalvador Dalí'sThe Persistence of Memory turn erect and break while the head and insects pass out, the heads of the couple onGrant Wood'sAmerican Gothic retreat into their bodies in the manner of turtles, the person overseeing the workers onJean-François Millet'sThe Gleaners shoots a starting pistol causing the workers to dash off like sprinters, and the color onEdgar Degas'sTwo Dancers falls off turning it into a paint-by-numbers picture), the cartoon ending with the fumes causing theMona Lisa to talk. Shebreaks the fourth wall and says "I can tell you chaps one thing. It's not always easy to hold this smile."
