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Director: Robert Morgan
Screenplay: Robert Morgan
A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #34
My first and only experience with
animator Robert Morgan beforehand was
with his entry for The ABCs of Death 2 (2014).
Called D is for Deloused, it's one
of the best of the entire film with its nightmarish qualities. Indebted clearly
to directors and follow animators such as the Quay Brothers, Bobby Yeah
nonetheless has its own aesthetic style that here in managed to be even more
disturbing and absolutely revolting at times. Animation that I love are about
the senses of the viewer being brought up front and centre, whether it's the
style and aesthetic of two or three dimensional animation, or the tactile
nature of stop motion; whether they have elaborate narratives or not, are
realistic in their character designs or the exact opposite, the best (and
usually underappreciated) examples are in tune to a highly rich and carefully
crafted production. Bobby Yeah
follows a simple narrative journey - the titular Yeah, a humanoid with what
only can be described as flesh bunny ears, steals a pet from another figure
only for his curiosity to press a button that appears on its back to lead to a
series of grotesque events, freakish monstrosities at his door and more buttons
he cannot help to push.
The result, a three dimensional
series of rooms in which the action takes place in, is the horrible cross
breeding of a textiles class project with Cronenberg
body horror at a meat counter of a butchers. Utter monsters populate the screen
mixing doll-like figure, pure pounds of flesh or pink clay and human anatomy in
their DNA, the most disturbing of the lot (and the most disturbing thing in
horror for me for a long time) being a full sized and exceptionally realistic
human face that writhes about with a tail like body. What adds to this horror
as a counterbalance, making it more unsettling, is both the stop motion nature
of the figures, made by hand and shakily moving about in spasms, and the inclusion
of textiles that evoke innocence in a deeply inappropriate way, the cloth
clothing of Bobby Yeah or the bubblegum pink felt fur lined walls of the figure
- a cross between an angel beanie baby and a flesh freak - the pet was stolen
from. The disturbing nature is to go as far as add explicit sexual aspects to
the creatures, of giant sperm with red string tails, the birthing of an egg,
and a literal tripod with a bird's head plonked on top of a mass of armless
gangly sausage. The content is, despite the apparent horror of it all, of a
very English take on what fellow animator
Jan Svankmajer did with found objects, re-use and emphasise their traits in
age and look in the characters he made from them, the Englishness from the
specific objects used - this manages (just for me) to get away with having a
head of a golliwog doll being used because, originally a bird's on the tripod,
its stripped from its racist symbology and is amongst a menagerie of disturbing
figures, and it wouldn't be surprising if Morgan
knew the inherent issue of this when he made to decision to use, even use this
fact to add to the disturbing use of the head for that particular character.
It's surprising how much explicit
content it gets away with as a BAFTA
nominated animated short, compared to how a live action version of this
material would get a strong reaction in reviews, unrealistic figures appearing
to still have life and a tangibility to them that makes the material still disturbing
to witness, but there's a lot of sick humour and deliberate weirdness to the
proceedings as well. A sudden sprint through live action countryside, brief, is
disarming yet strangely hilarious whilst Yeah's obsession with pushing buttons,
his fatal flaw which leads to the plot happening in the first place, skewers fairy
tale morality. As a result, the film clearly defines, as the project of his
that's the longest in length, a distinct style for Robert Morgan as an animator and director.
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Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Surreal/Weird
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium
Like many animated shorts - Svankmajer's, the Quays, even Looney Tunes
and directors like Chuck Jones -
their plastic realities are inherently abstract where, even in realistic looking
films which use real locations, one is forced to adapt to the reality shown. Especially
with stop motion, the process of creating figures and having to move them inch-by-inch
to create life in them, there's an inherent artificial bubble from the
disconnected movement and hand-made qualities that force you to re-assess their
reality immediately. The figures and world of Bobby Yeah beyond this also have a distinct visceral nature to
them, which slither and crawl along the ground, adding to this disconcerting
nature. Also there's the psychedelic tone of the short beyond the animation,
its music by ZnO almost atonal at
points and even a kaleidoscope series of colours being used a few times
including in a freak-out transformation sequence, their inclusion with the use
of textiles disarming in how they seen inappropriate on the surface to such
scenes but fitting perfectly after this is registered.
Abstract Tropes: Gender
Subversion; Inappropriately Shaped Genitalia; Animal-Human Hybrids; Psychedelic
Visuals; Use of Ordinary and Antique Store Objects in Inappropriate Ways; Stop
Motion; Full Body Mutation; Malformed Entities; Birthing; Machine-Creature
Hybrids
Personal Opinion:
Absolutely squirm inducing in all
the right ways. Whether Robert Morgan
can be able to extend a project of his in the future into feature length is
unknown, but four years worth of hard work on Bobby Yeah is visible and
incredibly accomplished.
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