This was such a beautiful
idea, and could have been something wonderful. And while I suspect I liked it
rather more than the critics who eviscerated it, and it had flashes of
something brilliant, mostly it simply wasn’t a good animation at all.
The strong idea: to take the
audiobook version of Graeme Chapman’s 1980 ‘autobiography’ – with four listed
authors other than Chapman and the typically glib appended joke ‘Volume VI’ –
and make an animation using Chapman’s voice. What we know now about his
hedonism, his alcoholism and of course his death from cancer will surely lend
extra poignancy, and getting the surviving pythons involved for new voiceovers
can only help, right? What’s more, to reflect the many and varied elements of
Chapman’s life, how about commissioning a number of British animation studios
to provide different segments for a compilation animation like Fuyu no Hi
or Genius Party? Sounds great, right?
Well, there are two massive
failings here – one is that the animations dictate the pacing, and the pacing
is entirely wrong; the other is that without fail, the animations are ugly. There
is no cuteness here, not even the quirky cuteness of Aardman or Peppa Pig.
There is no stop-motion or classic animation in the Superted/Count Duckula tradition.
There is certainly no Watership Down realism, storybook winsomeness of The Snowman or any of the clever mixing of styles of Gumball. I’m sure
it’s because of a low budget, but we get almost nothing but bad CG best-suited
to early 2000s European music videos (yes, I’m talking Jamba!-level), unimpressive Flash and some
clumsy hand-drawn animation in the style of unimpressive adverts. And not
Kellogg’s smoothness or Compare the Meerkat decent CG. The film fails to
represent either the history of British animation or how good it can be. Some
sequences are done very well, mind you, but others are awful and there is a
constant need for the experimental parts to be tempered by some sincere,
straightforward, solid animation.
The film starts very clunkily.
After an awkwardly-timed rendition of Chapman choking during the Oscar Wilde sketch
done in cut-out animation, we go back to his childhood, and things get awkward.
A story about body parts during World War II isn’t really one that benefits
from visuals, even crude cartoon ones, and Chapman’s ideas on class get
muddled. Asides with awfully-rendered monkeys as the Pythons long overstay
their welcome after the well-known story of coming up with the Python name. And
then while the scene of miserable British holidays in the rain worked, stiff
video-game CG for a quite clever passage about Freud (bafflingly played by
Cameron Diaz here) analyzing an obviously homoerotic dream about Biggles and
pointing out only signs of feelings of navigational inadequacy completely
ruined it. It not only made the dream itself hideously unfunny, it was far too
slow to unfold and all the humour dried up.
Bland animations covered
Chapman going to Cambridge and
meeting Cleese, who did an unkind impersonation of David Frost. The most
obvious and puerile animations were used for Chapman discovering his sexuality
(which came over far more as bisexual than homosexual) and sadly, later, his
penchant for promiscuity. Things got better as he realised his alcoholism and
he went cold turkey – the sort of event that requires odd, experimental
animation, which is what we got, and the animation towards the end where he
grows very tired of Hollywood parties yet incessantly namedrops is superb, like
a smoother Superjail, especially when Wilde himself appears – voiced, of
course, by Stephen Fry.
Chapman was a funny man –
ignoring the awful and butchered Yellowbeard – and I sense the
autobiography reflected that. But coupling his writing with badly-paced, ugly
animation kills it. And having all the Pythons bar Idle (whose singing voice
features) provide new voice-overs makes me think that the project deserved to
be better-realised than, sadly, it was.
No comments:
Post a Comment