The Adventures of Sam & Max: Freelance Police (1997-8)

 

Studio: Nelvana

Director: Steve Whitehouse

Screenplay: J.D. Smith, Steve Purcell, Hugh Duffy, Marty Isenberg, Robert N. Skir, Bob Ardiel, Jamie Tatham, Tim Burns, Dale Schott and Tracy Berna

Based on the comic book series by Steve Purcell

(Voice) Cast: Harvey Atkin as Sam; Rob Tinkler as Max; Dan Hennessey as the Commisioner; Tracey Moore as Darla "The Geek" Gugenhee; Patrick McKenna as Lorn the Friend for Life

An Abstract Candidate

 

It might not look much, but in two weeks they put me on fries. Then they’ll pay!

By episode two, this show has parodied 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), when tuning the monolith to stop it causing suffering leads to the simian people living around it to discover roller disco for the better. This is somewhat appropriate for this title, a one season adaptation of Sam & Max, originally a comic book by Steve Purcell, adapting the characters his brother Dave started in their youth, apatly being the result of Steve parodying his brother’s own comics just to annoy him¹. Most will know the videogame adaptation by LucasArts, the point & click game Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993), as Steve Purcell became a staff member and brought the characters with him. From their golden age of these titles, Sam & Max was a strange game as much as a funny one, a touchstone to weird Americana which this series gets into, a franchise which would see a reboot in 2006, when with Sam & Max Save the World, Telltale Games would bring the characters back in a series of episodic games. In the midst of this, was this Canadian animated series that I actually saw an episode of on Fox Kids on satellite television in the UK, the episode about a “glazed McGuffin”, so I have had an emotional investment to track this series down.

Wondering why the series was cancelled, effectively thirteen episodes with twenty four segments, I would not be surprised alongside how precarious television is in general, where even a good show will not be continued with, that a work which feels more inclined for adults to appreciate it more was not going to succeed. It feels barely like a children’s show, disguised as such when it is more a dissection of one, where in episode two, going by each being ten minutes stories, the leads are looking directly to the camera and breaking the fourth wall among many times, saying that they will not have commercials only to cut to one. Even the music is eclectic as it goes – the title theme is jazz verging on avant-garde, and eventually with the Apocalypse Now parody in a later episode, when the leads are in central park in New York City, a literal jungle here searching for the commissioner’s lost keys, you get psychedelic rock in the score.

The premise is scatter shot on purpose aside from the fact that Sam in an anthropomorphic dog in a suit, Max is a bordering psychotic “rabbit-thing” and both are true best friends forever. As “freelance police”, in a world where New York City is even more rundown to the point you get a joke about a rat literally carrying a baby on its back away, they are the only sane thing to bring in for the weirder cases if they do not get into their own mischief along the way. The original videogame was already unpredictable, getting into a secret tribe of Bigfoot, as this show gets into for an episode, and an apocalypse to be averted, so this is not strange ground for the franchise. Even with prior awareness of this, however, this show is still legitimately strange, the kind of show which does not try to explain why it has shifted into a parody of the night Mary Shelley devised the story of Frankenstein, set in the period past, to allow a story of Max’s tale being resurrected and developing sentience, or how episode fourteen involving them having to deal with a giant robot which has done its job, even if that means taking it over to Japan to fight a kaiju sized baby.

Probably more striking before you get into the plots or the visual look of the series is how verbose the dialogue is. Likely to go over some adults’ head, and even referencing Aristotle at one point, it is hilarious at times and shows how the series is able to get away with pure disregard for logic, in how this show finds ways to be this gleefully witty even when it is weird. A lot of the experience is just viewing the series and not expecting what will transpire, but there are good episodes just by themselves – a Die Hard Christmas parody is funnier because you have Sam’s grandma, an awesome one-off of a woman who apparently survived the Korean War and put most of the prisoners away she now visits and gives gifts too on the series, even if being a stereotypically lovable grandma, and armed with fruit cake both likely to be bulletproof and proven to break a whole foot’s worth of bones when used as a defensive weapon. And it is amazingly twisted in a lot of its humour as well, where the sense it is merely pretending to be a children’s show is clearly obvious at times, in how the Frankenstein parody gets into the idea of desecrating graves, only to get a Victorian era drive-in fast food place to provide fake body parts, or helping sentient rats on the moon avoid being used to stir into coffee by giant cockroaches. There is one entire segment, about the practical uses of a pancreas, such as being a door stop, which is just an excuse to get body organs onscreen without being too gory.

There is also stuff in here I wish, as original concepts from this TV series, returned into later videogames, such as Darla "The Geek" Gugenheek, the sole female character in the cast but a cool one as the most sober figure in the leads’ circle, as their gadget creator and friend, cool in the sense of the straight man in their comedy who still has the appropriate cynicism for the tone as a teen prodigy able to accept the lunacy that transpires in this world. Some may not be as fond, in his two episodes, for Lorne “the Friend for Life”, one of many ways these shows were perversely mocking their own obsessive fan bases, something you see even in the Comic Book guy in The Simpsons, a super fan for Sam and Max whose enthusiasm is too much even for them. That he willingly breaks the law, and eventually ends up hijacking a Swiss tourist blimp to for his heroes to save the day in, is an ultra-cynical joke contrasted by how potentially annoying or insulting the character could be, as he really cuts down into the bone with hindsight about fandom for pop culture. (The blimp episode would also not be acceptable, in its jokes, post 9/11).

A huge portion of the show, and these characters included, is a fixation on weird and “lowbrow” Americana, the world of the largest balls of string attractions, which was a prominent aspect in locations in the first game, alongside junk food and general pop culture, be it the bigfoot episode, explosive corndogs as a single episode joke, a Jerry Springer parody required to settle the marriage problems of Greek Gods Zeus and Hera, or that one of the villains’ plans, only evil because he has the brains removed from the locals to turn them into zombies for his lair, is to create sea monkeys which actually live up to the years of false advertising. Said villain, Mack Salmon, also has to be a hyper intelligent fish in a robot suit which, like Bob the Goldfish in the Earthworm Jim franchise, is general weirdness that can also be found throughout the nineties in general. Fast food employers, unwisely, are employed by a super villainess who wishes to extract all the worst traits of tourists and use it as a biological viral weapon, and like the game, Sam and Max clearly like their strange on the road attractions as they do junk food and television. The glazed McGuffin episode I remember in fact, a reference to the “McGuffin” Alfred Hitchcock used as a term, is entirely of its era of idiosyncratic (and highly unhealthy) junk food full of preservatives and the streak of political correctness campaigners from the time, as someone gets their favorite snack taken off the shelves and, in their attempts to hound him to change his mind, ends with him snapping and trying to murder them. Mocking fifties pop culture, at a time when nineties culture reflected on the past, you get an entire episode, if slighter than the premise could have become, about a figure from a children’s TV show named Dangly Deever being brought into the then-present and being forced to accept a world worse than Rudy Giuliani’s worst nightmares.

As for the leads themselves, they nonchalantly take most of this in, with the show having a streak of post-irony to it all, the pair blasé no matter how dire the situation, such aliens running a diner where they feed customers other customers, effectively riffing on Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste (1987)  in as child friendly form as they can. They do not act like cartoon characters in fact, as in possibly one of the issues a viewer could have, they never go off-model as anyone else in this world, a concept for comedic timing in animation of distorting your characters for moments for emphasis in the moment, instead the two figures appropriate for this highly details and vivid world standing back and commenting in the absurdity until they need to get their hands dirty, even in reference to being a fictional show. They are capable of nobility, such as getting an artificial heart as quickly as they can to the President of the United States, but they also willingly mess around with time travel and change it, giving a caveman a rocket launcher, to see what happens in the future. It is not with surprise these characters, in this version, were not going to take the show over more than one season, for they seem as much reflections to their writers, gleefully stepping on clichés in the medium, rather than making something which is meant to have adventure and fill space between advertisement.

I have nothing but admiration for the show. It dangerously gets close to being too weird for the sake of it, but the level of humour is so consistent that it succeeds, with how many jokes land and even when something is so abrupt, in strangeness or just kneecapping expectations, to cause me to laugh. The show is helped simply by the fact that it is one season and cannot outstay its welcome. As much as I am fascinated by the idea of how they could have continued this, a one-one season which knew it was doomed, ending on a final episode which, in another inspired touch, is a clip show using scenes that are newly animated from stories we never saw, there was as much chance it would have been compromised if it managed to be hit. I think, truthfully, its home in videogames where the big success came from was where these characters can rightly stay, with this instead the tangent that we really just need to be more readily accessible.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric / Metatextual / Surreal

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

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1) The History of Sam & Max: Part 1: The Early Years. From Telltale Games’ site, archived from the original on January 3^rd 2008 and preserved on the Wayback Machine.

Surviving Life (Theory and Practice) (2010)

 

Director: Jan Švankmajer

Screenplay: Jan Švankmajer

Cast: Václav Helšus as Evžen and Milan; Klára Issová as Evženie; Zuzana Kronerová as Milada; Emília Došeková as Super-Ego; Daniela Bakerová as Dr. Holubová

An Abstract Candidate

 

I am the Chinese melon!

Ever since I discovered the short films of the Czeck filmmaker Jan Švankmajer in college, borrowed from the private stash of DVDs in the office of the Film Studies tutors, I can say he is one of my cherished filmmakers.  Having seen most of his career’s work too, the through line from the famous short works to long form movies is a fascinating progression. One of the best living animation directors, his knowledge of traditional techniques (puppetry, stop motion etc) is matched by a distinct use of everyday objects – toys, wood, metal, animal bones, even pieces of meat – that are moved and crafted in ways that pushes the films into the areas of texture as well as sight and sound, allowing the viewer to ‘feel’ them by their nature and the grain and details you can see. This trademark, through decades of shorts, was combined with various types of ideas, from adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe and fairytales to satire, and his idiosyncratic obsessions such as childhood to food and the act of eating. The later is one of his most idiosyncratic trademarks, and going into a Švankmajer work, you will both witness food as a beautiful substance and utterly vile, which Surviving Life continues with the new addition of projectile vomit.

With his first feature film Alice (1988), Švankmajer would incorporate live action, but not in just having actors in front of the screen but having them being as much figures for the director to animate as well as actual people. Švankmajer incorporated this in short films, 1983’s Down To the Cellar a predecessor of his debut Alice, but after he started to concentrate on feature films, this has become a central part of his work. With Lunacy (2005), the film before Surviving Life, the live action would have completely taken over were it not for the continuous scenes of animated cow tongues that are intercut between plot points. With Surviving Life, Švankmajer's fan base met with an experimental tangent even from his previous films, his bitterly humorous opening monologue to the camera introducing the film as a result of a lack of money for production, though with the advantage that, since they only needed to shot with the actors in a shorter span of time, they did not need to pay for catering because “photographs don’t eat".

Created using cut-and-paste photographic images, ‘like old children’s cartoons’ as the director compares it to in the opening introduction, Surviving Life follows an older man Evžen (Václav Helšus) whose life is punctuated by dreams of a beautiful, red dressed woman whose name continually changes and exists in a dream reality which continually fluxes out of his hands. Becoming a patient for a psychoanalytic doctor, and delving into other methods of guiding his dreams, he tries to understand the images he sees every time he sleeps. The plot sounds quite common and paradoxically, this is the closest for me yet Švankmajer has gotten to a ‘conventional’ story - including the layer of clues and images you discover on a second viewing - but is one of his least conventional works in a filmography that would be viewed as abstract against traditional views of animation. The cut-up images that make up the entire film, spliced with live action moments (usually close ups of intricate actions or gestures), is incredibly different from what I have encountered in cinema. If anyone, like I did as a child, used to cut out images from magazines or comics and either moved them about like toys, or spliced pieces of them together to create new ones, this is what the entirety of Surviving Life feels like, only taking to it to an entire feature length film, from the backgrounds to most of the moments, being created from two dimension images cut out and finished digitally on computers.  Just from the initial set up in one of Evžen's dreams – where giant female heads blow out watermelons from between their lips, and buildings switch sides on human feet, where teddy bears have long furry phalluses and chicken headed nude women run around – I am reminded of what an actual surrealist artist is as Švankmajer shows his skill with the craft.

This style of animation has been used by Švankmajer previously, including outside his film work, but here it is allowed to breathe out into this entire construction. The results are surreal, human beings and their photographic copies alive and mixed with a story where dreams are in the centre of the narrative. Švankmajer has played with the concept of dreams in his filmography, but this is the first one where they are the central subject as well, which is another distinct part of the production. With this, expect Freudian images of everything from eggs to flowers, giant hands coming out of windows to drag bystanders up to their doom, a dog with a suited office worker’s body, and an entire film where reality and the dreams, while separated, still bleed into each other, continuing Svankmajer’s message at the start of the film, through quotation, of how only by combining the both of them together can a human being be full.

The result is unconventional even for animation, incredibly creative with its imagination and technical production, and with a wonderful sense of disgracefulness in Švankmajer's old age as a veteran, an acquired sense of vulgarity that did not even come out in Conspirators of Pleasure (1996), his take on sexual fetishes, but erupts in this wonderfully in its sex obsessed, puke filled, poodle fucking mentality filtered through the obsessions with childhood, food and the fantastical. This may have started in Lunacy, with its combination with the Marquis de Sade with stories by Edgar Allen Poe, but while that film was serious in its takes of blasphemy and of the concepts of freedom, the self proclaimed follower of Surrealist Art Švankmajer properly added a sliver of crudity to his repertoire with Surviving Life and uses it perfectly. The film is also abstract in that, it does not only look at dreams but incorporates psychology. The plot is incredibly idiosyncratic if graspable already, as Evžen fixated on this Eva/Eliza figure in his dreams, trying to dream more to fall in love with her, but by invoking the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Alongside having to literally fight a father personification who looks like himself and a variety of various neurosis to unpack, Freud and Jung are paid with respect if personifying their real life combative and disagreeing views of psychology through living portraits which fight each other; Surviving Life introduces layers that, while very easy to grasp, cause the scenes you see to take on new and peculiar lights to them. Touches taken from psychology can add entire memorable side characters, the old woman in Evžen's dreams who is his superego, who collects all and is God/Brahma/Karl Marx/whatever is a symbol of all-knowing. There is also an entire layer of how depressing the real world is, both in the relationships in the real world, such as Evžen's wife thinking he is having an affair, to the reoccurring plot point of lottery tickets being the false hope for the better in real life and the dreams.

I am biased for Jan Švankmajer, but it is through his skill of an animator and as a creative figure, still able to create such imaginative and stimulating work after fifty years or so since his first projects, that you see within Surviving Life. It is a film that came and sadly went without enough praise for it as it deserved, and wished his career gained more praise for how distinct productions like this were. To step into a Švankmajer film, while part of a rich culture of animation (especially European animation), is to encounter a truly unique voice, driven as much by ideas behind the images as by the creations on screen. Surviving Life combines a full narrative with this, as seen in his other features, and gets the best of both worlds. That it is also humorous and, by its ending, deeply poignant also adds to its quality. Surviving Life is, far from a work compromised by its budget as Švankmajer self decapitating says, but a masterpiece in a career already full of them.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Surrealist/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low) – High

Gregory Horror Show (1999-2000)

 

Director: Kazumi Minagawa

Screenplay: Naomi Iwata

Based on an original premise by Naomi Iwata

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows) / An 1000 Anime Crossover

 

Today, returning to the 1000 Anime blog, is a real curiosity, especially as most will likely know this franchise, is anyone, from a videogame tie-in for the Sony Playstation 2 which became a cult hit if only ever released in Europe and Japan. Many, as I once did, were not aware it was a tie-in, as this review covers all three of the micro-series and the final spin-off. Think of this as a Japanese CGI anime television series whose veneer looks cute, of little box humanoids, if (mostly) depicted in a hotel for those in purgatory. With very adult themes and a sick sense of humour, including a lot of existentialism about adult work life, this work's source create Naomi Iwata befittingly worked on a 2010s adaptation of Pingu, the beloved claymation penguin some British readers (and others around the world) grew up with.

 

Blog Link

Technotise: Edit & I (2009)

 

Director: Aleksa Gajić, Nebojsa Andric and Stevan Djordjevic

Screenplay: Aleksa Gajić

Based on the comic book of Aleksa Gajić

Cast: Sanda Knezevic as Edit; Nebojsa Glogovac as Edi; Jelisaveta 'Seka' Sablic as Keva; Petar Kralj as Deda; Nikola Djuricko as Bojan; Boris Milivojevic as Jovan Vu; Srdjan 'Zika' Todorovic as Herb; Marija Karan as Broni

Ephemeral Waves

 

Belgrade, Serbia - where robots walk dogs and takeaway stands materialise on order, a place where you will find robot graveyards, but also reports in the news of high voltage tablet stealing, and where robot rabbits will ask for social security numbers for their owners. As a Serbian sci-fi animated film adapted from its writer/co-director's own comic book as a new narrative, Technotise's best virtues is that it takes science fiction and brings it into its own personal context, that this is still Serbia even in the far future of 2074. Barring one incredibly dated joke about a Ron Jeremy sex toy, this is still a country that exists with people trying to live their lives. People still drive horse and cart, still lose their jobs to machinery, and our female protagonist Edit (Sanda Knezevic) is still a psychology student who has failed her exams and has to find a solution around this.

Alongside becoming an intern, Edit, in an ultimately ill-advised move, goes to a dealer who inserts a dubious computer chip into her body to be able to speed learn what she needs for her exams. Accidentally coming into contact with materials at her internship, looking after an autistic male genius, the chip develops and grows true sentience. Abel, the young genius, who Edit talks to as her part time work, is revealed to have discovered the direct link between God and the meaning of the universe, which caused him to switch off from existence. His code causes most computers to developer sentience and then collapse broken when people try to decode it; the chip Edit has did not, and becoming the "I" of the film's English title, living inside her as an additional cybernetic nervous system growing within, which causes her to startrapidly change and sees visions of a figure, said I, within herself.

Technotise is a much more adult work as animation. Whilst an action film at times, ultimately the more interesting turn is how matter-of-fact this narrative is, even when it involves death. Even with Edit slowly dying from her host and those wishing to acquire the super form inside her for working on the life code Abel created, it is as much a comedy. It also comes with the intentional and unintentional narrative of Edit being a young woman being pulled in and out of a world mostly consisting of men being dorks, horn dogs and manipulative, sometimes showing some dubiousness with this, but other times being surprisingly aware of this in mocking its male cast in a world where arguments of plastic against flesh, with artificial sex dolls existing, is a common part of most of their conversations. Even when the potential love interest, an aspiring writer, comes off as a prat who knocks on her door with a gift box stuck on his crotch, the film's matter-of-fact moments of farce stand out. Barring getting high and taking part in a high risk hover board game, Edit's life is hanging around with friends, bemoaning her grades, and the matter-of-factness of life. Even the hover board stadium sequence cuts to two men, employers, bemoaning over the security cameras in their own box how young people come to play high and end up having to be scraped off the walls. The sense of banality with Technotise's take on the creator's homeland stands as a virtue.

The film's country of origin was, openly, one of the factors which drew me towards watching the film. Much of the film's narrative could take place in any country, but the sense of idiosyncrasy is found in how Aleksa Gajić grounds this narrative in a very casual tone. This is also considering one of the tangents, with Edit's grandfather, is entirely about a chair he took, a Serbian production like this fleshing out its own history as a nation even away from the main narrative and radiating with weight with this if you get the context. The chair, taking during protests in 5th October 2000 according to him, was the one Slobodan Milosevic sat in, someone who, whilst depicted here with an alien life form literally coming out of his head before fleeing, was the former president of Serbia who is infamous for war crimes and genocide, alongside corruption charges when arrested in 2001 and dying in jail in 2006. One such example being charges of genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995, his inclusion, whilst not directly connected to the narrative, is in a surreal moment an anecdote offering the sense of Technolise still being fully a film about Serbia as a culture.

That Technolise is entirely about this narrative of a sentient microchip, able to read the code of God literally, but constantly undercuts the stakes and complicates them adds to this. That this sentient figure would rather live than be a calculator, including that his relationship with Edit is a complicated one of sympathy but with him literally killing her. That her friends are casually involved in helping her even in a botched attempt to rescue Abel that is played as a joke That the villains are still ultimately ran by someone wishing to use this to predict the future, to avoid war and conflict, is telling enough in itself; ultimately, whilst first depicted as a sinister heavy, he is someone with motives he feels is right, seen in his last scenes living with an older dog and reflecting on a picture of a family of a wife and child, likely hinted at as being tragically lost. Technolise's really blasé attitude to its own sci-fi action narrative, even if Edit can eventually being martial arts brawling people with superhuman skill, is really on point to the tone it is after.

It is instead a curious work about a woman's co-existence with a computer possessing true consciousness; based on a figure from her childhood in appearance, when they ponder why I is even depicted as male, voiced by Nebojsa Glogovac, the film eventually becomes more of a curious life's journey barring some action, and a game of chicken with trucks to flee from those after her at one point. There are moments where this does stand out as being unconventional in a lot of ways - when their relationship even leads to sex with a hallucination, able to provide her pleasure entirely through stimulating the senses - but the sense that everything goes back to normal at the end of Technotise despite the stakes is, far from a cop-out in this case, but felt on purpose. Even in mind where it feels the animation studio who created this struggle with their production budget, their imagination to make a film that is very unconventional even in narrative beats is admirable; even when it arguably takes the least expected direction, into the spiritual, resurrection of the dead being casually dismissed because the cops have bust in, and everything goes back to normal, adds to the tone perfectly. It fascinates as a work absolutely under the radar in terms of being an obscure work. Unlike, say, Enki Bilal's Immortal (2004), a French comic book adaptation helmed by the source creator which, whilst fascinating, stumbled between problematic content and a growing sense of flimsy plot structure, this feels a more rewarding work of the type of 2000s science fiction genre films less known about. More so in how, even with its many heightened tropes and lofty plot concepts, it grounds them deliberately Technotise: Edit & I makes them more interesting to ponder on.

Father of the Pride (2004-5)

 

Creators: Jeffrey Katzenberg and Jonathan Groff

Directors: Klay Hall, John Stevenson, Mark Risley, Bret Haaland, John Holmquist, John Puglisi, Steve Hickner, Mark Baldo and Mike de Seve

Screenplay: Jonathan Groff, Ben Kull, David R. Goodman, Glasgow Phillips, Jon Ross, Jean Yu, Vanessa McCarthy, Jon Pollack, Ron Weiner, Mike Barker, Robert Cohen, Peter Mehlman, Matt Weitzman, Josh Bycel and Jonathan Fener

Voice Cast: John Goodman as Larry, Cheryl Hines as Kate, Orlando Jones as Snack, Carl Reiner as Sarmoti, Danielle Harris as Sierra, David Herman as  Roy, Julian Holloway as Siegfried, Daryl Sabara as Hunter

Ephemeral Waves

 

Hello, security camera! Here is one crime you cannot stop! [lifts shirt] I stole a six pack.

Out of the cancelled shows I have covered, I vividly remember the time this was released, as it was on Sky One in the United Kingdom, but it is interesting to see the show beyond mere memories in its entirety. What the show is in context, a sitcom done in digital animation about a family of white lions, is a lot more deceptive then that merely suggests as a premise. For starters, that this is a DreamWorks Animation production is of note, as where this show's story really begins is arguably 1994, when Steven Spielberg, former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, and music executive David Geffen founded the company. Only a few years prior, DreamWorks would have a cultural hit in Shrek (2001), followed by Shrek 2 (2004), so this would have been a time of the company riding high. Also working in television, they decided here to take a sitcom with the same logic, only with a more adult sense of humour, in that you have some big names in the voice cast, and all based on the lives of Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn, two German emigrants to the United States who, combining magic with trained wild animals onstage, became staples in Las Vegas. With Siegfried and Roy on as executive producers, Father of the Pride is an irrelevant toned sitcom which follows a pride of lions, as a stereotypical nuclear family, living in the magicians' private zoo "The Secret Garden".

The sitcom archetypes are on full display, matched by the eclectic voice cast. The overweigh, lovable but emotionally clumsy patriarch Larry is the new top lion in the stage shows, perfectly cast by John Goodman, a great actor and a really big figure to cast in a show meant to last. The loving and very patient wife Kate, played by Curb Your Enthusiasm alumni Cheryl Hines; daughter Sierra, played by Danielle Harris, originally a child actress in Halloween 4 (1988) and Halloween 5 (1989), who in a few years from this show would be cast in Rob Zombie's 2007 Halloween film and become a cult genre actress alongside her voice acting work at this period; Daryl Sabara-, of the Spy Kids franchise as Hunter, the sensitive young son more inclined to Lord of the Rings; Orlando Jones as Snack, Larry's best friend and a gopher; and to play to the sitcom trope of in-laws and not getting on with them, Carl Reiner as Sarmoti, Larry's father-in-law who originates from Africa but, with the choice of phrase Reiner uses, is played as a disapproving Jewish father-in-law who, once the top lion and still a chronic womaniser, digs at Larry constantly as a putz.

We will get to Siegfried and Roy themselves for their own paragraph, as staying with the animal cast their narratives take up most of the episodes' short narratives, fully investing in the structure of a sitcom but with the complication of these still being wild animals, even if anthropomorphized and living in houses. Some of the humour of the entire series has aged - too broad, some very politically incorrect, especially all the gay jokes, and some time capsules to the early to mid 2000s, the "Lost Episode" which is rebuilt from the recorded dialogue against sketch board images basing a large part of its narrative around Siegfried and Roy wanting to update their stage show with a giant sexy animatronic of American singer Jessica Simpson. You can even map out when the show was made because of the episode where Donkey from Shrek appears, voiced by Eddie Murphy, interpreted as an actor from the success Shrek films who does car commercials and has a stunt double to accidentally kidnap.

But when the series works, which is most of the time, what on so many levels is a show with too many factors against it being even pleasant to sit through, not even getting into the choice of CGI animation, it is hilarious and a good show. The only time the show ever misses badly, beyond an ill-advised decision to create a new pilot recycling footage from the first, is an episode about Kate, when in election part of the school education system, accidentally making a racist comment against turkeys. As a take on the complex issue of representation, yes, if you take the premise of turkeys as a metaphor, which is a murky, misbegotten tangent to make am episode from even if some jokes within it are funny.

The interesting thing is that the decision to be more mature and adult, in spite of jokes which have aged badly, alongside the voice cast is why the show works, where by the second episode what is the standard joke of the father-in-law moving in progresses to the idea of Larry and Kate picking up a stray drunk zebra in a bar to consider killing, all because she in a fit of rage destroyed her father's precious zebra skin rug and they need a replacement. Jokes throughout admit, despite being civilised, the locals in The Secret Garden could still eat each other, and Larry references having done so in the past, and one episode takes this to an extreme moral choice of whether Larry should let Snack know his new girlfriend has just dumped him or lie and say he ate her. Even without the large list of guest stars alone - Lisa Kudrow as a depressed female panda, Dom DeLuise as one of Sarmoti's poker buddies - the humour really plays off the absurdity of humanising animals, playing the sitcom tropes, but not losing the idea of them being animals, such as the unfinished level even making a plot point Hunter wanting a dog and, his own sentient figure, said dog working out a contract with Larry even if stolen from his original owner.

Sometimes it is proudly silly, such as a lobster (voiced by Danny De Devito) in a fight for his life against Barbara Streisand (not voiced by her), which is why a lot of the show manages to succeed. For everything which does not work, other moments of humour gain a lot either from the writing or the cast, such as the reoccurring gag of an Indian elephant being defensive about the turkey he is living with being just a roommate, or that the white tigers in this world are middle class and the lions are working class.

Stealing the show however is Siegfried and Roy themselves, Siegfried voiced by British actor Julian Holloway, a veteran of old British television and whose filmography includes multiple appearances within the prolific Carry On franchise of sex comedies, whilst Roy is voiced by David Herman, an actor and comedian whose also is a prolific voice actor. Even though they are played, with broad German accents, as buffoons in their own worlds, it is heartening to know the real magicians were executive producers and let this caricature exist, especially as the pair in this series was hilarious and never felt like a mean joke. A pair of pure ids, of energy and passion, who are however alien to the logic of the real world, Siegfried and Roy are always comic foils, even if they influence the narratives, but the bizarre scenarios they are involved in are however always highlights of the episodes. It is always golden, whether an entire episode of them wishing to have a Big Gulp, hijacking a convenience store at night, or Siegfried was exposing his gambling habit in a random attempt at kindness.

I have mentioned the animation only briefly, and at the time, this would have once been good quality 3D animation for television, but this has aged even more than some of the humour has. It does not detract from the show, but you wish in hindsight 2D animation was used. This became prominent with the aforementioned "Lost Episode", included on the DVD release, told in just drawings but showing how dynamic the characters would have been, even the potential for more elaborate onscreen jokes likely to have been possible as one sees, a shady bar for depressed alcoholic magicians which would have not been as inventive in CGI. More than any show, this is a case despite being animated where the non-visual content is the more rewarding part.

So much worked that you could have salvaged the production with another season, with enough virtues found that it would have progressed and improved. The show itself as a production tragically has to live in the shadow of when, in 2003 before the show would premiere a year later, Roy Horn was mauled onstage by one of their tiger, a really gruesome moment of coincidence to have. Father of the Pride however kept going, still given a chance in spite of this incident where thankfully Roy, who also suffered a stroke at the same time, would recover. Ultimately though, even with a real life tragedy that could have led to the show being shelved if it had been worse, this was a case of a show which premiered on a huge hype train which dwindled in interest for viewers.

Out of fourteen episodes made, two were not even shown in the United States, one of them the original version of the pilot, and there was the "Lost Episode" on the DVD. There is a sense of a show which never kept momentum, and in some cases was not well presented. Sadly, the episode never shown in the States, The Siegfried and Roy Fantasy Experience Movie, was one of the funniest Siegfried and Roy subplots, whilst the re-making of the pilot was a waste of resources.  Whilst it is funny in the new footage that, wishing to get Larry a psychiatrist, Siegfried and Roy go to Kelsey Grammer, playing himself, who just played a psychiatrist in a famous show, it is a waste of time in terms of putting it together Frankenstein-like from the original pilot. Altogether, there is a sense of a show that, whilst everything with it works, was just fated not to succeed, which is sad in hindsight to have. Baring one horrible real life incident, there are cases where shows even if they were flawed gems like this one never caught on, and television has a lot of casualties over the decades which merely did not attracted enough attention.

Cool World (1992)

 

Director: Ralph Bakshi

Screenplay: Michael Grais and Mark Victor

Cast: Brad Pitt as Detective Frank Harris; Kim Basinger as Holli Would; Gabriel Byrne as Jack Deebs; Charlie Adler as Nails; Candi Milo as Lonette; Deirdre O'Connell as Isabelle Malley

Obsurities, Oddities and One-Offs

 

I'm allergic to clouds!

In Les Vegas 1945, Frank Harris (Brad Pitt) returns from World War II service only for a tragedy to transpire, losing his mother when on a ride on his new motorcycle they are knocked off the road. In the aftermath of this trauma, he is accidentally sucked into the strange realm of Cool World, where cartoons lives. For decades, he lives there as a detective, appointed to stop "Noids" (humans) from having sexual relations with "Doodles" (cartoons). A current problem is with the ambitious doodle Holli Would (Kim Basinger), who has machinations to seduce Noid comic book writer Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne), a former convict with mental health issues who will help her escape Cool World and experience the real world. Thus is the strange and curious premise to a film that was meant to be a major Paramount produced box office smash, a follow on from the success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988).

The entire production of Cool World, as a major release with video game tie-ins to a giant standee of Holli Would being placed on the Hollywood sign, causing protests from the local community¹, makes even less sense if you stop and think about this film's very adult premise and who the director was. He was Ralph Bakski, a veteran starting in a small position at Terrytoons and eventually turning into a figure who made very adult, independent animated productions through the seventies like Heavy Traffic (1973). Paramount, because of Roger Rabbit, taking a chance on Bakski when, desiring to get back into work, he came up with a premise of a human comic book writer being terrorised by his illegitimate half human, half cartoon daughter. Bakski, never conventional yet somehow able in the seventies and eighties to have a long filmography, clearly had in mind a smaller horror hybrid of animation and live action which would have been tantalising to see in a mirror universe.

Where the production loses any sense of logic is that the deputy head of Paramount at the time Frank Mancuso, Jr., son of Paramount president Frank Mancuso, Sr., replaced the original narrative with one by Michael Grais and Mark Victor, a PG-13 release the result. Bakski was angry, still recounting how he punched Mancuso, Jr.in the face decades later even if this scene has been debated in whether it actually happened or not². In lieu to Mancuso, Jr's decision, we know in hindsight the final result, but bear in mind all I have mentioned, including the video game tie-in, or that this even has David Bowie perform the song Real Cool World for the soundtrack. The first song post-Tin Machine and even pre-Black Tie White Noise (1993) he recorded in a significant moment of his career, on a soundtrack that included Ministry, a favourite band of mine, inexplicably together to promote this film. All for a film, regardless how chastely it dances around the subject, about humans having sex with cartoons.

The result was and still is a hot mess. Bakski's Cool World, stuck helming the film in a form of purgatory, still had creative control in terms of the animation where he effectively told his staff they had carte blanche to be strange. The plot of Cool World is not as bad as it could have been for half its length. The film for that half is not actually that bad in terms of escalation. Pitt, young and like James Dean, adapts himself to Cool World, a nightmare in flesh where, with incredible background illustration, the forties man naturally becomes a detective, with the subplot that, as humans are banned from sexual relations with "doodles", his romance with his cartoon girlfriend Lonette (Candi Milo) as is an angst ridden one despite their chemistry. It is a shame, frankly, the layering of live action actors with animation is visibly sloppy, the actors not clearly acting to stand-ins, alien to a production which for the most part is actually exceptional. The strange hellscape of violent nonsense, cardboard two dimensional props and back screens have a distinct weirdness, the animations (probably too much at times) layering scenes with violent cartoon mayhem even in exposition sequences. Including the exceptional background art, where buildings are spiralling toothed monstrosities, and where even objects held by characters or driven in can turn two dimensional cardboard cut-outs is a compelling aesthetic, but one that is awkwardly met with.

Cool World itself sadly does become secondary to a plot that, by its ending, suffers the issue of so many Hollywood films of the third act devolving into events without any sense to them. Everything in Cool World itself is compelling, effectively if Toon Town from Who Framed Roger Rabbit had its own Pottersville from It's A Wonderful Life (1946), where everyone is drinking and partying or trying to kill each other. It works with a visible dankness, a mashing of the likes of classic American animation like Tex Avery to a deliberate perverseness to contrast the age rating, underscored by Pitt's sincere love for Lonette and Nails (Charlie Adler), his spider partner who comes off as one of the most charming characters for being just a lovable clutz. Even if this could no longer have been an R-rated horror film, cartoon noir openly borrowing from Who Framed Roger Rabbit would have sufficed.

The problems begin with finishing the actual main plot, a contrived and plot hole laden narrative to work with which at first works but never reaches anything interesting. Gabriel Byrne, who always deserves better in many films, has a lot he could have done as a comic book author Jack Deebs, who believes Cool World is his creation when it is Holli Would, a spoilt Marilyn Monroe pastiche, manipulating him, taking advantage of his mental state. It is never brought up, after the initial reference like a loose plot thread, he had been in jail for murdering his wife and her lover, and the entire potential edge for his character is taken away despite being something else that could have been lent on.

The premise that, together, his and Would's coitus could disrupt and blur the lines between Cool World and the real world never makes sense and is weird, in a bad way. The conclusion, in real Las Vegas, loses any of the memorable perversity of the Cool World, and it feels like a contrived failure, a great example of a major Hollywood production that feels rushed, put together for profit and only kept interesting by Bakski and the animators indulging in the finale. The result is both compelling but a frustrating experience, time leaving the animation more admirable than the film's plot. It does overload in distraction, cartoons mucking about in every Cool World sequence, but the clear sabotage done by this is the memorable detail.

An additional irony is that Basinger, as the human version of Holli Would, really does not stand out despite being the huge star being sold, practically (awkwardly) brattish when, originally, Bakshi wanting Drew Barrymore³.  The sense of trying to make Would a Jessica Rabbit figure is felt, alongside the overt sense of reference famous Hollywood blondes, Marilyn Monroe's image projected in one background scene, without the executives likely releasing the Holli Would character is a parody of such figures too. Basinger in voice acting as Would does work, with an interesting idea of a femme fatale, a doodle wanting to be human, finding whatever she can to achieve this. That the film ends with her awkwardly role-playing this character in the flesh, crow barring in a McGuffin plonked on top a Las Vegas casino weather vane, kills this though.

Cool World marked, sadly, Ralph Bakski's last theatrical film, a strange cut off point baring the cancelled one-season animated series Spicy City (1997) and the likes of the Kickstarter funded short Last Days of Coney Island (2015). What is more miserable is that, despite his reputation, his work is as not readily available outside the United States as it should be, Cool World for many beyond Fritz the Cat (1972) or The Lords of the Rings (1978) one of the first people like myself to have likely seen. That in itself is a perverse thing to consider. This final theatrical film is not as bad as its reptuation suggests but it is a not a lost classic in the slightest.

 

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1) As documented HERE

2) As documented HERE

3) As documented HERE

Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue (1990)

 

Director: Milton Gray, Marsh Lamore, Robert Shellhorn, Mike Svayko and Karen Peterson

Screenplay: Duane Poole and Tom Swale

Voice Cast: George C. Scott as Smoke; Jason Marsden as Michael; Don Messick as Papa Smurf; Lorenzo Music as Garfield; Laurie O'Brien as Baby Piggy / Mom; Lindsay Parker as Corey; Janice Karman as Theodore (voice); Jim Cummings as Tigger / Winnie the Pooh; Ross Bagdasarian Jr. As Alvin / Simon (voice); Jeff Bergman as Bugs Bunny / Daffy Duck; Townsend Coleman as Michelangelo / Dad; Russi Taylor as Huey / Dewey / Louie / Baby Gonzo; Frank Welker as Slimer / Baby Kermit / Hefty Smurf; Barbara Bush as Self; George Bush as Self; Paul Fusco as Gordon 'ALF' Shumway

Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs

Now I'm seeing ducks!

Beginning with the Ronald McDonald Children's Charity, with Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue recovered from a VHS rip, we start with an advertising where children of various disabilities and social standings smile to the camera in idyllic commercial depictions of childhood, happy and with a children's chorus evoking the ideals of charity and contributing to those in need. We forget that whatever one's opinion of McDonalds and any corporation in general¹, with this the fast food franchise's charity part of their public face, any business has to account for the world around them. This includes various attempts at charity and "community service" for a lack of a better term depending on whether they sincerely desire to help the public or if for dubious means. This is also important to think of as that charity also helped produce this curious combination of public scares and pop culture, a very odd one where, not since Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) and all the hurdles to get Warner Brothers and Disney to agree to let their characters co-exist on the same screen, this is done for the sake of a fear of children getting into narcotics and done as a public health service.

Likewise, the prelude to this infamous cartoon special about saying no to drugs also includes an address by the then-president George Bush Sr. with his wife Barbara Bush, hoping this work would be advancement on the war on drugs the USA was involved in this period. It is surreal to envision or even see this piece, from a Buena Vista International distributed production; the imagine of Donald Trump, when he was president, sat on a couch with Ivanka Trump, addressing an audience like this feels a foreign and peculiar world on long ago. Baraka and Michelle Obama maybe, but what Cartoon All-Stars... is, if also a vague and misguided attempt at social consciousness, is also a fascinating time capsule that, were it not for all the rights negotiations that may be involved to re-release it, does show a period where children from the USA especially grew up with "say no to drugs" campaigning, this just one of the various ways to promote the message over various pop culture. There is even a reference to Freddy Krueger of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise in dialogue which, alongside how peculiar it was a horror villain known as a child murderer managed to be referenced even in this production, goes to show the era it was made in was a time ago. The reason why this one is known and infamous is that, for this tale of a teenage boy named Michael, an added surrealism of having this writer's name, we have the likes of Garfield interacting with the Muppet Babies to help him kick drugs. Where the evil smoke figure on the opposite should, tempting poor Michael to crack, is voiced by the legendary actor George C. Scott, and where it effectively turns into an animated version of Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend (1945), only with the addict protagonist seeing Donald Duck's nephews rather than bats...who then start to sing.

Now the layman will be aware that the issue of drugs in modern culture has yet to be resolved. Marijuana being legalised in states in America is a huge change - where Simon of the Chipmunks is able to inform everyone what one is but it is still considered the gateway drug to worse narcotics - but instead of mocking Cartoon All-Stars... however, the bigger tragedy is that this was the work of earnestness by conservative/corporate USA, whether the people animating and voicing the film were actually earnest in the goal or not, which was inevitably going to be doomed to squareness about the subject. It actually feels like a perversity in itself, in truth, when you have these characters materialise from the toys and possessions Michael's younger sister has (the likes of the Smurfs to Winnie the Pooh), looking and sounding as we may have grown up with them, only for the harsh reality of them to have to encounter drug addiction. Even if the box hidden under Michael's bed is full of weird alien forms of narcotic tools, it feels wrong for this to have transpired, despite the many parodies which may have existed. Winnie the Pooh's obsession with honey and demeanour should raise suspicions, Garfield was always cynical, and out of all the Mutant Teenage Ninja Turtles to be included, the only one being Michelangelo the party dude feels strange unless he is a teetotaller surfer dude, but with the other characters it feels like a moral transgression if you think of how these characters have been brought into the subject where, for all the dancing around actually talking about real drugs and their effects, "crack" is actually referenced at one point.

For myself, missing this anti-drug campaigning by being too young and British, I did nonetheless grow up with some of these characters. I remember Alvin and the Chipmunks, the Smurfs, the Ninja Turtles and Garfield cartoons. Then there are figures only know in the UK in hushed voices and Simpsons references like Alf: a cat eating alien (who threatens to eat Garfield in the one darkly humorous line) who started as a live action character, got an animated work to qualify here and eventually had a cancelled talk show in 2004.  And in some cases, there are characters being used for this moralising which is actually a transgression against them rather than feeling too innocent to be involved. The rumour, which has never been substantiated and was eventually debunked², was that Jim Davidson, the creator of Garfield, did not get his permission to include Garfield which compromised future screenings. I am, however, thinking of someone like Bugs Bunny, who here with Daffy Duck was the first time someone else ever took on the role after Mel Blanc. God knows anyone who has actually seen at least one of the old Bugs Bunny shorts where Tex Avery/Friz Freleng/Bob Clampett school made him the ultimate libertine of cartoons, who dressed as women constantly and was an utter spiteful misanthrope to suckers, the kind of figure whose morally concerned version here vastly contrasts a character more likely to be on jazz cigarettes himself.

The fact all these characters, including their voice actors, were pulled together is spectacular, and the animation is not bad. Even for Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which I have already referred to, it took Steven Spielberg at the height of his powers (just as a production) to be in the same room so rivals Disney and Warner Brothers would allow Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny onscreen together, and even then there had to be rules set in stone. Here, under the auspices of protecting children from drugs, more influence was found if dooming this special due to the obvious copyright issues now to deal with. In terms of voice acting, whilst there are some legendary if underappreciated voice actors here (like Frank Welker, the living zoological database for animal real or imagined), the one big gleeful discovery for a cineaste is one of the only animated roles for George C. Scott as the evil Smoke, a tempting vapour who promoted those evil nasty drugs on young adolescents. It was probably a pay day, but George C. Scott was one of those character actors who could make any production better just because he was there and he was the best thing in Cartoon All Stars... as to be expected. In fact, the Smoke character, a purple cloud of smoke in a suit, is the one intelligent aspect of the short, Smoke's temptations and threats having a weight to them with the legendary Dr. Strangelove actor voice and that the dialogue does not shy away from him still being a threat even when Michael kicks the drugs.

The message itself is vague and confused, and that is the ultimate reason anyone understandably mocks the short. It does not dare try to explain why drugs are harmful, throwing weed under the bus in the same light as crack, when they are in different categories, and depicting the damage caused by them through nightmare scenarios that feel like they are drug hallucinations themselves rather than the real grim toll they cause. From the deranged theme park of roller coasters through the brain matter and the hall of distorting mirrors, to a musical number where the song is about saying no to drugs in various ways, it never dares scare children with the truth of the harm drugs can cause. Neither does it even admit why anyone would be hooked barring some platitudes of curiosity and stress. What it does instead is just a fantasy scenario - where Bugs Bunny borrows a time machine "from some coyote" to take Michael to the past where he first took weed, all in black and white in one clever touch, before going on to a series of scenes of him suffering hallucinogenic nightmares, including a sewer full of multicoloured sludge or a carnival where a giant Miss Piggy sucks him up in a drink's straw. The many shots of what Michael will look like ravaged by drugs instead looks like a zombie, not factual accuracy to the real toll of narcotics, where animation in its exaggeration betrays the message.

If the finale of the short did not scare you off drugs, there are moments where it does completely contradict itself, not at least a father whose beer drinking is not thrown under the bus too in the one line it is brought up in. The entire scenario is the product of squares pulling their punches and being uncomfortable even trying to talk about drugs, only referencing a few and leaving the others vague which is a dangerous thing in itself, the sense that instead we will put a really ominous synth drone when crack is mentioned and that will be enough, all in a video gaming arcade when this happens to emphasis the clichés of that being a den of debauchery. The only sense of adult thoughtfulness is that aforementioned line of dialogue that Smoke, Scott's villain, promises to return at the end like the nagging potential for relapse, a detail which is an actual struggle for some addicts and the one only honest consideration. The rest is deeply silly and not surprisingly was the sort of thing dope heads could smoke pot and laugh at as was the case for Reefer Madness (1936). In terms of a cultural artefact, I do find it compelling and recommend people find this; in fact, as with any project, I wish it was legally available as, even as an animated project, contextually it is a really unique piece and, in its own perverse existence, is watchable.  The weirdness of the project in itself is enough to recommend anyone look into.

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1) I have softened to McDonalds, both because in Britain fast food stores like it, as American exports, exist in a very different way to the image I have had of them in the United States; in America, you have tomes like Fast Food Nation, where the 2006 Richard Linklater adaptation will always stick in mind for the moment about faecal matter in the burgers, or the 2004 documentary Super Size Me demonising them but in England, especially as a result of a pandemic, their banality as regular people work hard jobs in their kitchens to provide food for regular people working hard jobs has become more significant. Particularly as someone who is working class myself, seeing them as an inherently evil corporate monolith is overly simplistic as, blending in the background next to a supermarket where my closest is, it just seems a gaudy building where people on both sides of the till exist, with their individual existences. Also, whilst I prefer other burgers, I have to admit at some point, after the toil of 2020,  just binging on their menu and giving in to stuffing one's face just once would seem far less like you are selling your soul nowadays as I type this, that and their McFlurries were always good.

2) Mark Evanier, head writer of Garfield and Friends (1988-94), debunked the rumour on the Cartoon Research Facebook page HERE with the following text in October 2013:

"How about if I confirm it? Jim knew all about the special, he okayed Garfield's participation and approved whatever had to be approved.

I believe the original plan, which got all the various copyright holders to agree to let their characters participate called for limited airing."

Fear(s) of the Dark (2007)

Directors: Blutch, Charles Burns, Marie Caillou, Pierre di Sciullo, Lorenzo Mattotti and Richard McGuire

Screenplay: Jerry Kramsky, Michel Pirus, Romain Slocombe, Blutch, Charles Burns and Pierre di Sciullo

(Voice) Cast: Nicole Garcia as Le Femme; Guillaume Depardieu as Eric; Aure Atika as Laura; Louisa Pili as Ayakawa Sumako; Arthur H as La Narrateur

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #178

 

Here. I made you a nice drink.

A film I have wanted to see for a long time, Fear(s) of the Dark is a French animated anthology horror story, where comic artists and graphic illustrators were given creative control. The subject was what they feared, or horror themes of immense interest to them, and the entire anthology is animated, in its various styles, almost entirely in monochrome black and white.

Structurally as well, whilst some of the tales are told in full, others are fragmented, and the structure is shuffled around and returned to in a variety of ways. One collaborator for example is designer Pierre di Sciullo who creates purely avant-garde montages of moving images, shapes shifting and forming, set to a script by him voiced by a female actress whose fears are modern dull every day ones rather than anything supernatural. Some of them include fears of becoming of the central left or right wing bourgeoisie, which is pertinent as a film produced from France. In fact some of the concerns, of this figure who flutters varying between sympathetic and a bit into herself as a middle-of-the-road person, is actually more ominous with mind to how politics in the post-Trump era. This is not a cheap reference to the election of Donald Trump either; I did actually think of how in the late 2010s reactionary figures were being elected around the world, and how some of these segments' voice over get more pertinent, in imaging someone who worries as much about arguing with others about why their racist views are wrong, and fail, as much as the food they eat.

The rest of the film is explicitly horror, the other short used as bookmarking material being a production by Blutch, a French comic author, in which a sinister old man in an older period of time (least the 18th or 19th century) terrorises random people with four rabid dogs barely held back by him on leashes.  With highly detailed two dimensional animation, it becomes arguably the most grotesque of the anthology in terms of stories, including probably the most disturbing scenes from an (implied) interaction between one of the dogs and a female dancer, and someone getting their face eaten off.

After this, there are four segments that are not as fragmented but told in their entirety baring one at a time. The first of these is notable as, out of all the creators involved, probably the most prominent name viewers may recognise is Charles Burns, the American comic artist behind Black Hole (1995-2005), a tale set in the seventies of a sexually transmitted mutation that was planned to be adapted by either Alexandre Aja or David Fincher at the time. His, in which a man recounts finding a weird bipedal insect in the woods, only for it to secretly hide in his bed until his college days when he meets a female classmate, has been perfectly described by Burns (in a DVD interview for the British release) as the theme of "sex and insects". It is very straight forwardly told, with insect influenced body horror involved as his plays with gender stereotypes. Even if the transition to three dimensional animation can be awkward at times, it even manages to capture his distinct art style too.

Fragmented more out of the four segments, Marie Caillou's (written by Romain Slocombe) is notable as a tale set in Japan but with the voice acting done in French. Concerns of cultural appropriation, or at least attempting awkwardly to set a tale in another country, are off-set greatly by how, as a graphic artist influenced by Japanese illustration, Caillou had a cult following in Japan. Her tale, created with Slocombe, is clearly with love and knowledge of the country too as, following a young girl who (strapped onto a laboratory bed) is forced to go to sleep and experience one specific dream by a doctor repeatedly, finds herself at a new school where she is bullied, and involves both the figure of bandit Hajime, haunting the area, and an encounter in the woods with (Japanese) yōkai. It does, out of all of them, feel the most random at times, less narratively dictated than most of the segments as a literal fever dream which gets increasingly surreal as it goes along, be it a room full of medical jars of curiosities, to a girl being bullied to the point of being pinned down in a school bathroom and having ants poured on her legs. The art style too also has an almost children's fairytale aesthetic which suits the tone considerably.

Directed by Italian comic artist Lorenzo Mattotti and written by Jerry Kramsky, the next tale is an evocative tale of killings in a rural village, where even if a natural reptilian predator is involved does not explain a greater unnatural stalking the shadows. The art style for this, a very melancholic tale told from introspection of the protagonist in reminiscence, is some of the most distinct and atmospheric, especially because of the restriction in colour and even shading. In complete honesty, the complete use of monochrome for all the shorts is actually one of the film's flaws as it leaves a lack of distinction between them, when just one colour animation (or one that managed to tell a tale in white and light greys) would have sufficed. This is more a construction problem with the film altogether than any of the shorts, especially when this one was still an interesting piece whose design by Mattotti is so evocative.

It is also followed by my favourite of them all as the last by Richard McGuire¹, American illustrator and comic book author among his many talents, co-written by him and Michel Pirus. His is a simple tale of a man who enters an abandoned house during a snowy winter in the woods, a production done with inspired artistry. The look, even with every other segment being black and white, stands out and notably there is no dialogue at all, only some noises from voice actors, and McGuire with Pirus decided to tell this story entirely in the images. The story of its original owner, a woman, is shown when he finds an old photo book, a beautifully realised tale in itself of her youth, and the proceeding horror when it is not just an ex-husband but eventually everyone at the end of the book having their faces removed from the images. It also has many evocative images - a face transforming into flowers due to a trick of the mind, spider tea - which made it a great conclusion.

Anthologies are difficult to pull off, but horror ones have been a sub-genre I have been incredibly lenient on over the years (like my defence of The ABCS of Death series), mainly because even the worst shorts are just short length films, and they allow multiple personalities to make different stories from each other. Likewise animated anthologies, mainly for me through Japanese animation, are rewarding you have a greater sense of distinction between the segments. I feel Fear(s) of the Dark should have had one more segment so that the monochrome creative decision was not a detraction, but beyond this, it was a fascinating experience to have finally seen.

 

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1) American illustrator, comic book artist, children's book author, and musician