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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ROCK-A-DOODLE (1991)

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DIRECTED BY: Don Bluth

FEATURING: Voices of Glen Campbell, Phil Harris, Christopher Plummer, Ellen Greene, , , Sorrell Booke, Sandy Duncan, Toby Scott Ganger

PLOT: Chanticleer, the rooster whose morning crow brings daylight, leaves for the big city to become a singing star after the Duke of Owls banishes sunlight.

Still from Rock-a-Doodle (1991)

COMMENTS: Walt Disney Animation, purveyors of fine animated fairy tales since 1937, tried in three separate decades to build a feature out of the medieval tale of the arrogant Chanticleer, whose call was thought to summon the sun. The rooster boasted a fine pedigree, including an appearance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and a starring role in a play by Edmond Rostand of Cyrano de Bergerac fame, so a film showcasing a big singing bird seemed right up the studio’s alley. Alas, despite repeated attempts and the efforts of some of the Disney crew’s greatest storytellers in the studio’s history (including Uncle himself), they never found a way to make the story work, finding the central character too unlikable. Maybe it’s just a point of stubborn pride that Disney apostate Don Bluth, who notoriously ditched the 70s-era Mouse House due to its lethargic approach to animation, concluded he was the man to crack the code.

Bluth’s solution was to deliver story in bulk. In addition to the source tale, we’ve got the addition of a new villain with a plot to block out the sun permanently, a mapped-on telling of the later years of a certain king of rock ‘n’ roll and his manipulative manager, the adventures of a bunch of country animals new to the city, and most oddly, a live-action framing story in which a young boy is reading the very story we have been watching, only to be dragged into it himself by a torrential rainstorm accompanied by a surprise dose of magic. The resulting movie somehow suffers both from a surfeit of plot and an alarming lack of it. There’s an awful lot going on, and it’s well-animated, but there’s not enough time for anything to get the attention it needs. (Subtract the credits, and the film barely squeezes by at an hour.) The movie is an undercooked omelet with too many ingredients.

Rock-a-Doodle reeks of post-production panic. The rapid-fire intro strongly suggests a first act hacked to pieces by studio notes and confused comment cards, and the solution seems to be enlisting Harris (a Disney mainstay making his final film appearance) to ladle more and more narration on top of the hastily edited footage in an effort to knit the disparate elements together. Logic takes a beating; it’s hard to reconcile The Duke’s plan to destroy all sunlight with the fact that Chanticleer is shown that the sun continues to rise without him.

Bizarrely, the movie consistently undercuts its best idea: Chanticleer as Elvis. It’s a cute notion to pair up the cock who heralds the sun with the pelvis stops millions of hearts, and the bird’s coxcomb is an amusing analogy to Elvis’ famed pompadour. Bluth and Co. know this is the twist that sets their version apart, and they almost go all in. Bringing in Glen Campbell to voice the character (his ability to impersonate Presley was so pronounced that songwriters frequently hired him as a stand-in for demo recordings). Enlisting Elvis’ own backing group, the Jordanaires. Lacing the film with choice elements including Vegas glitz, rockabilly tunes, and a Colonel Tom Parker analogue. And then, having gone to such great lengths to rhyme with the legend of The King, the filmmakers proceed to interfere with every single one of Chanticleer’s musical numbers, burying them beneath dialogue, sound effects, or narration. We don’t get to hear a single performance all the way through until the closing credits. Every chance to appreciate the joke is obliterated. It’s a perplexing act of self-sabotage.

Rock-A-Doodle feels like an idea that might possibly have worked if given the chance. It also feels like an idea that was thrown into the meat grinder because it didn’t work at all. It’s hard to know which is right. All we can know for certain is that Disney said no thrice, while Bluth said yes once, and it’s the little guy who probably rues his decision.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…in the end I had to surrender every shred of reason and common sense and just go along for the ride. Everything about it, from the grotesque delirium of the animated city sequences to the cornball artifice of the live action scenes with Edmond and his family, is so bizarre and tonally misjudged that it offers up a perverse kind of pleasure. I’m actually amazed that this film doesn’t have a more robust cult following – it has ‘midnight screening’ written all over it. … I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone with a penchant for the weird and inexplicable.” – Scampy, The Spirochaete Trail

(This movie was nominated for review by Suren. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

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Rock-A-Doodle

Rock-A-Doodle

  • ROCK A DOODLE ROCK A DOODLE (1 DVD)
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Apocryphally Weird

67*. THE TRAGEDY OF MAN (2011)

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Az ember tragédiája

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“Man’s greatest weakness is his love for life.”—Molière

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Voices of Mátyás Usztics, Tamás Széles, Tibor Szilágyi, Ágnes Bertalan

PLOT: God creates the universe; Lucifer, the eternal spirit of negation, tells God that Man will inevitably revolt, and is allowed to tempt Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. After the Fall, guided by Lucifer in various guises, Adam watches his descendants slip into tyranny and debauchery in more than a dozen succeeding segments that run from the earliest cavemen to the last humans of the far future. Adam returns from his historical survey feeling suicidal.

Still from the tragedy of man (2011)

BACKGROUND:

  • Based on Imre Madách’s 1861 play “The Tragedy of Man.”
  • The same story was adapted to film in 1984 as The Annunciation, with the story enacted by a cast of children.
  • Although production began in 1988, it took Jankovics 23 years to complete this magnum opus. Since his state-backed financing ended with the fall of Communism in 1989, he animated individual segments one at a time as funding allowed.
  • Because the film took so many years to make, many additional voice actors had to be brought in, although Mátyás Usztics (Lucifer) and Tibor Szilágyi (God) were available for the entire production.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: In a nearly 3-hour animated film where each individual frame is a work of art, it’s a boggling process to try to pick a single image to represent the whole. Forced to pick, we’d have to go with something depicting Lucifer, the key figure driving the drama. The version of him as the red-eyed shadow with translucent wings, reminiscent of  Fantasia‘s Chernabog, works as well as any other.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: The French Revolution was just Johannes Kepler’s dream, Spaceship Adam

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The literary source material might be dry, but Marcell Jankovics uses it as a launching pad for his constantly morphing, psychedelically-colored cosmic animations, transmuting the already complex story into a nearly-three-hour-long fever dream.

Blu-ray trailer for The Tragedy of Man 

COMMENTS: It seems that Marcell Jankovics can make nothing but Continue reading 67*. THE TRAGEDY OF MAN (2011) →

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: INTERFACE (2021)

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DIRECTED BY:  Justin Tomchuk (AKA )

FEATURING: Voices of Justin Tomchuk, Libby Brien, Christa Elliot

PLOT: A lone man and a pink shape-shifting parasite wander and reminisce in the aftermath of the Philadelphia Experiment.

Still from Interface (2021)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Interface has a dreamy vibe from start to finish, uncanny and uneasy in the vein of ‘s works.

COMMENTS: Interface is not your typical, shallow Adult Swim-style surrealism, even if it may seem like it at first. A melancholy and sense of existential dread infuses every scene. Something uncanny lurks in the movie’s corners, and it isn’t just the monster accompanying our protagonist in his wanderings.

The setting is an alternate version of the aftermath of the Second World War, in which the Philadelphia Experiment had unforeseen consequences. (For those that do not know or remember, the Philadelphia Experiment is an urban legend about a hypothetical U.S. Navy teleportation experiment). Many sci-fi movies— especially B-movies—have been inspired by this story, most notably Stewart Raffill’s The Philadelphia Experiment from 1984.

Interface approaches this narrative more subtly than previous adaptations, recalling a dream and a work of pure surrealism. We follow, for the most part, two survivors of the Philadelphia Experiment, a lonely man unable to grow old and die and the shape-shifting monster that accompanies him everywhere. The lonely man wanders aimlessly, a soul trapped in limbo, while the accompanying parasite uses him as a host for its own survival.

There are clear symbolic undertones. The protagonist represents modern man, trapped in guilt and grief after catastrophic event (WWII). The parasite works as a personification of the negative emotions consuming him. A lyricism underlies the grotesque absurdity of the situation, highlighting the personal and collective trauma.

Memories of the past, as well as scientific attempts to restore that past, are interspersed throughout the movie. The focus, however, remains on our hero and his attempts to move on with his life (or his death). The uncanny, retro digital animation—recalling movies of the 80s and 90s—adds to the uneasiness of his situation. The melancholic soundtrack, composed by the director, does the same.

For the art lovers out there, there are a plethora of visual references to paintings, especially surrealist paintings, like Rene Magritte’ s “The Son of Man” or ‘s entire oeuvre. Even seemingly random abstract shapes in between scenes recall Kandinsky. These Easter eggs showcase Tomchuk’s wide range of influences and rich intellectual background.

“Interface” started as a web series, and it is still available on Youtube in its entirety for free; you can also rent or buy it on VOD for an ad-free experience that puts a little money in the filmmaker’s pocketbook (and even less in ours). Alternatively, you can purchase a Blu-ray or VHS version directly from the director for a more immersive retro experience.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…meditative, philosophical, atmospheric, surreal, imaginative, fantasy-sci-fi animation that brings to mind Mamoru Oshii at his most enigmatic and bizarre with a light sprinkling of Miyazaki.”–Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre