PLOT: Five tales loosely based on Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.”
COMMENTS: Masunaga’s debut is a decent, if somewhat clumsy, attempt at a collaboration with Hollywood’s studios. Even if it plays it by the book—this is a children’s film, after all—it remains a hidden gem, making it of some interest for those loving obscure and long-forgotten cartoons.
This anthology, loosely based on Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” starts with Peter Ustinov’s pompous voice-over. Ustinov is the only voice in the film—none of the characters speak for themselves. This admittedly cheapens the experience a bit, but in the end it doesn’t prove too distracting. The stories take place in the heaven of Greco-Roman mythology, with a young boy playing a different role in each tale. It may seem unnecessary to have the same character as a different protagonist each time, but works for younger viewers by creating a point of familiarity.
The stories are familiar to older viewers. We have the doomed love affair between Orpheus and Euridice, the campaign of Perseus against Medusa, and the tragedy of Phaethon. Light psychedelia accompanies everything—we are in the seventies, after all —with some segments even recalling “Alice in Wonderland.” With its lush environments full of cute animals as well as eerie secrets, the art style will appeal to fans of Disney’s animated classics. Fantasia (1940) is a point of reference, even if Winds of Change remains mild in comparison. We can’t really talk about dream logic or surreal imagery here; instead, we have a magical realist visual feast with a rich soundtrack on top. Anachronistic pop ballads, classical tunes, and a hint of Africa complement the visuals, creating a sense of phantasmagoria.
Let it be noted that the alternate edit titled Metamorphoses from 1977, with songs by Joan Baez and Mick Jagger, is unavailable.
Before becoming an award-winning documentary filmmaker, Rodney Ascher collaborated with animator Syd Garon on this Jack Chick tract brought to life as an After Effects collage in which a young man discovers he has eternally goofed by not accepting Jesus Christ.
Arnold begins to believe his world of amorous monsters, ghosts, mermaids, down-on-their-luck duck actors, and ACME coffee is nothing but a set. Now a feature film. In Spanish, so turn on closed captions if you don’t speak the language.
CONTENT WARNING: Sexuality, adult topics, and hot reverse mermaids.
PLOT: A Canadian cartoonist interviews his half-Cree brother and his numerous nephews and nieces to make an animated documentary about their shared family history.
COMMENTS: Animator Seth Scriver sets himself a difficult task. He thinks his half-brother, Pete (born to Seth’s father and an indigenous woman of the Cree tribe) is the greatest storyteller he’s ever known, and wants to document those tales. But Pete lives on the Shamattawa reservation in northern Manitoba, a location so remote that there are no roads and visitors must fly in. Pete’s large family has no experience with filmmaking, and the sound quality is so bad Steh frequently has to scrap recordings and start over. He’s excited to get a grant from Telefilm Canada, but his financial backers grow increasingly skeptical with the work-in-progress (“Is this what you’re doing with the money we gave you?” “Tell me, Seth, why is this pizza scene going on so long?”). A project that was supposed to take 7 months to complete stretches out to 9 years. But he crosses the finish line, and he and Pete finally deliver a heartfelt but oddball saga that sometimes approaches outsider art.
Seth’s lack of direction for the project becomes both a thesis and a running joke. His vague but lofty aspiration is to create a documentary that’s “funny, beautiful, spiritual, political, complex, simple, and true.” Easygoing Pete is fine with the plan: “oh, okay.” The original idea is for Pete to tell seven stories, but his first attempt, a tale about the time he got his hand caught in a Conibear trap, is interrupted by the sound of a flushing toilet in the background. (Pete won’t finish this story until the end of the film.) Seth’s briefly-glimpsed flow chart for the movie is composed of irregular scribbled blobs representing scenes and looks like a bulbous, winding intestine instead of a straight arrow. The seven story structure is scrapped in favor of a laid-back method of just recording daily life and squeezing in stories as the come, an approach that better fits the documentarians’ personalities. While sitting around the table at Pete’s house—interrupted by Pete’s daughter Cookie offering to make sound effects for the film—Pete talks to his father on the phone, and Seth’s mother tells a story about a dream Pete told her, which leads the father to reminisce about a fishing trip where he encountered a strange glowing globe in the sky. And so it goes. As they slowly progress through each episode, with digressions aplenty and flashbacks nestled inside of flashbacks, a portrait emerges of Pete’s family and the way First Nations people live today: clinging to some traditions while jettisoning most for modern conveniences. This unforced, as-it-happens methodology allows the movie to touch on social topics like indigenous incarnation rates, lack of access to clean water and hunting lands, and historical injustices without seeming pedantic. Somehow, the movie ends after the apocalypse—although it eventually circles back to the present, because the past is an endless cookie.
The meandering style fits Scriver’s ADD animation style, which can best be described as “cute grotesque.” The brothers are drawn as clowns assembled from Mr. Potato Head parts, with plastic hats perched atop their rotund heads and big floppy noses; they wouldn’t look out of place in Yellow Submarine. Other characters become anthropomorphic trophies, slices of toast, right-angle rulers, or baby onions—not to mention the eponymous Cookie, who’s an actual talking chocolate chip cookie. Scriver puts enormous detail into every deceptively crude Flash animation frame, and indulges in surreal flights of fancy at every opportunity: coffee cups add commentary, real characters intrude on the stories (and vice versa), and a suicidal family member drives an eyeball motorcycle into a desert eternity. Endless Cookie is never visually dull, to say the least, and although some people can’t connect with the meandering storytelling, it resolves into a conversational format: one idea sparks another as stories wind their way through the tapestry of life, indifferent to temporal and physical laws. In the end, Scriver checks off his list of “funny, beautiful, spiritual, political, complex, simple, and true”; he just forgot to add “and kind of weird.”
FEATURING: Voices of Eric Gilliland, Sarah Silverman, Dermot Mulroney
PLOT: A middle-aged bartender recounts a tragic tale of doomed love to a young couple.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Plympton’s trademark animation style, verging on surrealism, meets a personal take on familiar rom-com and high school drama tropes.
COMMENTS: Bill Plympton is a major name in American adult animation today, especially for those preferring the offbeat and the bizarre. His raw and expressive style, full of crude jokes and grotesque yet hilarious visual gags, balances gross-out humor with a lighthearted and wholesome tone. Nowhere is that blend more apparent than in High Hair, a unique take on high school rom-coms with a Burtonesque twist.
A barman recounts the tale of Cherry and Stud and their unexpected, passionate love affair to two young students. We trace the teen drama tropes from the beginning: Cherry is the popular girl, and Stud is a nerdy, friendless loser. Cherry already has a boyfriend, the muscular Rod, another reason Stud shouldn’t have a chance with her in real life. However, when Rod “punishes” Stud by forcing him to become Cherry’s slave, something sweet and slightly kinky blossoms between them.
A love affair starting as a power game or a conflict is another well-worn trope of romantic comedies. But Plympton’s approach offers something different than what you’d might expect. The first half of the movie is full of crude, if admittedly inventive, jokes. Disturbing imagery is played for laughs, with even a hint of animated body horror. Gradually, a sweet love affair blooms, one that, surprisingly, doesn’t feel uneven or forced at all. The second half of the film follows Cherry and Stud falling in love, until a final twist combines the dark and macabre with an unexpected, yet not unwelcome, dose of tenderness.
Among the visual gags of special note—and there are many—are jokes about the characters’ hairstyles. As the title hints, hair is a rich symbol in this movie. Follicles can express femininity or masculinity, and even take the form of a phallic symbol. Here, hair indicates hierarchy and social status.
All in all, this is a whimsical film, a perfect date movie for weirdos. Those who aren’t turned off by some bad-taste humor will be rewarded with a touching narrative. Behind the weirdness and grotesquerie beats a heart.
![Hair High [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41WE16m-lXL._SL500_.jpg)