SeeQuant Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Teddie Blake The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

phantom_tollbooth Alex Lovy's 'Norman Normal' is an exceptional little satire on business ethics and social behaviour. Produced by the new Warner Bros. department in the late 60s (long after the dreadful Speedy and Daffy series and lacklustre new characters such as Cool Cat had made Warner cartoons seem entirely past their best) as a "Cartoon Special", 'Norman Normal' takes an entirely different approach as a hip animated think piece which ultimately takes place inside the titular character's head. The amiable Norman must fight off unethical propositions from his boss, endorsements of conformity from his father, peer pressure from his acquaintances and the desperate search for approval by a man with a lamp on his head! A whole new contemporary attitude is apparent, especially in the scene in which Norman refuses to laugh at a joke about a minority group which seems like an apology for Warner's decades of politically incorrect racial humour (although a year later Warner Bros. animation department would close down with a short called 'Injun Trouble'!). The satire is sharp and funny and the modern atmosphere is enhanced by a catchy theme tune by Peter, Paul and Mary. It may have little in common with the golden era of Warner cartoons but 'Norman Normal' is a wonderful short and one of the few latter day Warner shorts that really works.

slymusic "Norman Normal" is a Warner Bros./Seven Arts one-shot cartoon that is very strange. But then, it's the sixties! Our hero, the title character, is a businessman who apparently gets to choose the path of his life via a series of doors. The animation is nothing really special, but the results are, shall we say, interesting.My two favorite scenes in this cartoon: First, Norman and his boss decrease in age and height as they argue together. And second, one of Norman's inebriated buddies regales him with a joke about a traveling salesman and an Eskimo ("That was no walrus. That was your wife!").There's not much else I can write about "Norman Normal"; you'll just have to see it for yourself. It somehow got tacked onto the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 6 Disc 4, even though it is not a Looney Tune.

tavm Just watched this extremely rare Warner Bros. cartoon on the Misce-Looney-ous Blog. With a story, voices, and title song sung by Noel Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul, and Mary, the title character of Norman Normal (voice of Paul Dixon) is a young ad executive who's told by his boss to get his latest client drunk in order to sign a contract, tries to talk to his father about right and wrong but only gets stories of the Depression from him and gets told to "fit in", and encounters at a cocktail party a lampshade wearing guy who keeps saying "approval", another drunk guy who tells a racist joke about Eskimos, and a bartender who says, "You don't want your real personality to show, do you?" when Norman refuses a drink. Directed by Alex Lovy, this supposed pilot for a possible TV series showed some promise when Norman and his boss are talking and they literally turn into a bully and a shy kid while discussing their client as if the whole thing is something that brings Norman bad memories of his childhood but the subsequent stuff with the father (who literally floats in the air when discussing his past) and the cocktail party fell flat with me. Still, this one-shot from the near end of the Warner Bros. cartoon factory in the late '60s is worth a look for anyone with a taste for the unique. And dig the rock band that appears in the beginning and end!

Hotoil There are no falling rocks, speedy animals, clumsy hunters, Sinatra impersonations, mafia gags, or violent rabbits here. But this under-appreciated classic animated short came from the same studios that brought us Bugs Bunny, Road Runner & Tweety Bird.Not only that, it came out of the studio's worst era, which consisted of mostly bad Daffy Duck & Speedy Gonzalez shorts. Most of the animated pieces to come out of Warner Bros. in the sixties were predictable of Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett & Tex Avery classics, and they didn't fair well in theatres as the pre-film cartoon was just about extinct.But for some reason, an undeniably smart and subtly hilarious social satire rose from the ashes of the dying genre. I am of course speaking of "Norman Normal". I had heard decent things about it but when I saw the actual cartoon, I was on the floor laughing. The closest thing I could relate it to would not be any other WB cartoon but rather the Simpsons at their best.This may have been a nice series, but perhaps best left in it's own right as a singular sensation. Of course it didn't make much of a splash in it's time and thus will probably never see the light of TV, but hopefully the Cartoon Network will dig it from it's vaults and let a whole new audience appreciate it's short but sweet alternative comedy stylings.