Bunny and the Bull - A Short Kind of Review

Don't know when or if this 2009 comedy by Paul King is going to be released in the US, but it's worth discussing for a few reasons. King is the director in charge of a good 20 episodes of the Mighty Boosh TV series, and will probably handle the feature film version of that enterprise, so it's reassuring that this, his first feature, works as well as it does. The Boosh tv show is sort of an odd duck - it's a comedy that stumbles about in an odd, stream of consciousness fashion, with far more emphasis placed on absurd turns of phrase and elaborate graphic design than jokes and punchlines. The tone here is somewhat similar, and its still a comedy, but the whole essence of it is quite a bit different.

In short, an agoraphobic young man remembers details of a trip to Europe he took with his friend Bunny a year ago, which ended with him in his present state. The OCD/agoraphobia thing plays like lazy short hand, the character dynamics (though well played) suggest that the everyone involved saw Withnail and I a few too many times at an impressionable age, and it all ends up feeling both overextended and a bit slight at the same time. But the film uses the flashback structure to present almost all of the remembered material in an exaggerated, mixed media style, sometimes slipping into the territory of straight animation. What's fascinating to me, though, is that there is absolutely no attempt to make the slips into animation at all seamless; you can get a little of the effect from this clip. The flashback structure presents a nominal excuse for this kind of thing, but it's a slim one.The most comparison I've heard is to Michel Gondry's style, but if anything this goes further.

This is hard to articulate, but: this kind of special effects work is nothing new, and in a way the philosophy behind it goes back to Melies at least. Video, however, makes it feel much different, and the fact that this is digital video makes everything feel much different; when every single frame of video has been digitally "sweetened" you simply don't feel that the appearance of a stop-motion bull is an intrusion at all, just an extension of the artifice. A lot of people were wringing their hands over just what kind of impact something like Avatar will have on the way people will watch and make films, but I would argue that it's a low-budget independent film like this one that shows the real impact these technologies are going to have on the film making that will emerge in the near future.

"L'Ortolan" - Lilli C a r r é

L'Ortolan from Lilli Carré on Vimeo.

So, Lilli Carre, the young cartoonist whose book The Lagoon is one of the more interesting books I've read in t he last few years, has been making these strange little short films and uploading them on her Vimeo page (all in addition to the great drawings and animated .gifs she has on her blog. She has about five shorts uploaded, and each one is well worth the time it takes to watch (I think What Hits the Moon is particularly good).

The re-emergence of this kind of animation is, I think, one of the great things about the youtube/vimeo world we live in right now. You used to get a ton of short animation as a part of going out to the movies, of course, but that hasn't been true for years and years before we were born, despite the botched attempts by theaters like the IFC center in NY to add short films to their programming. But lo and behold, put up an online video service and you start to get things like this - charming, low budget, and personal. Not to overstate the democracy of this sort of thing - Carre is an accomplished cartoonist with four published books to her name, in addition to all the short work she's done in publications like MOME - and I do not want this to sound like triumphalism for the web. But the existence of this sort of thing, readily accessible and for free, is the kind of thing that makes a bright and sunny morning feel just a little bit less wretched.

Also: Renee French has the best blog of any working cartoonist, by my estimation.

Formalism

Micro Loup from Richard McGuire on Vimeo.

Richard McGuire's "Micro Loup" is one of those brilliant little shorts that seems to come out of nowhere. Unless, of course, you're familiar with his long, strange career. The cartoonist behind the incredible six page comic Here, which is one of the most inventive bits of concentrated narrative I can think of. Playing bass in Liquid Liquidtoo, and then getting sampled for White Lines. And this strange kind of almost film career.

Everything he does seems to touch on these formal plays, tricks of style that come off as either effortless and charming (Micro Loup) or absolutely devastating (Here). In every case they're kind of brilliant, the sort of unassuming brilliance we could all use a lot more of. Of course, that sort of thing doesn't make one rich, and that may be a reason he only has a handful of work for his years in the field. Children's Books aside, of course.

Anyone Else Excited For This?

Gainsbourg is of course the great French song writer and film maker; this biopic is directed by the great French cartoonist Joann Sfar. Plenty of other trailers online, including a full trailer ; a good bit of nudity in that one so watch out kids. A video of the real Gainsbourg below.