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.
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