Les Shadoks
Fans of the “cartoon modern style” will get a kick out of the well designed look of this 1968 episode of the French aimated series “Les Shadoks”:
Les Shadoks features quite a bit of offbeat philosophical humor, roughly translated the first principle of Shadok logic is “Why to make things simple when you can make them complicated? “
According to Wikipedia here’s some interesting bacground info on Les Shadoks:
“Les Shadoks was the invention of the seminal French cartoonist Jacques Rouxel (February 26, 1931 – April 25, 2004) and became a major French TV phenomenon in the 1960s. The Shadoks were bird-like in appearance (in the tradition of cartoon birds they had beaks with teeth), were characterised by ruthlessness and stupidity and inhabited a two dimensional planet.
Another set of creatures in the Shadok cannon is the Gibis, who are the opposite to the Shadoks in that they are intelligent but vulnerable and also inhabit a two-dimensional planet. Rouxel claims that the term Shadok obtains some derivation from Captain Haddock of Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin and the Gibis (who wear Bowler hats, which unlike their heads, contain their brains) are essentially GBs (Great Britons).
Pre-dating and in many ways exceeding the strangeness of the bizarre humour “pioneered” by Monty Python nearly a decade after the Shadoks first appeared, the Shadoks were also a significant literary, cultural and philosophical phenomenon in France.”
And here are another two episodes worth taking a look at:
And last but not least here’s a French wesbite on the subjet (and of course it’s in French):