On 07/07/07, a series of benefit concerts was held across the globe under the banner of Live Earth, with the intention of raising money and awareness for the battle against climate change (following a similar model to the Live 8 concerts that had been held a couple of years prior) - an event that I think now is largely remembered, at least to those who saw the Wembley concert, for the controversy generated when Phil Collins sang "Invisible Touch" with colourful new lyrics. But there was also some interesting stuff happening on the animation front, with Aardman Animations having been commissioned to make a series of environmentally-themed shorts to screen in between footage of bands performing. A total of three shorts were produced, Can One Person Make A Difference?, Gridlock and Unravel, none of which were even half as traumatic as that Turtle Journey film Aardman made for Greenpeace in 2020, but hopefully they still helped in getting the message across. Of the trio, Gridlock was the only one that dipped into Aardman's well of established characters, by having Angry Kid weigh in on the problem of traffic pollution.
Angry Kid, a strong contender for the title of least cuddly Aardman creation, was the brainchild of Darren Walsh (who also provides the voice of the titular character) and took an irreverent, puckishly grotesque look at teenage angst, curiosity and alienation. In a nutshell, it's best recommended to viewers who thought that Kevin The Teenager was an inspired caricature, but too genteel. It follows the adventures of a snot-nosed (literally and figuratively) adolescent brat with a cocky inquisitiveness and a vulgar, somewhat twisted sense of humor. A large number of shorts involve Angry Kid coming to blows with his Dad, who is frequently heard (voice courtesy of David Holt) but always stays out of the camera's view; he gets understandably exasperated with his son's awkward questioning and behaviours, but his periodically vindictive reactions suggest that Angry Kid's mean streak could well be genetic. Other shorts involve Angry Kid tormenting his younger sibling, Lil' Sis, who is regularly able to one-up him, and his best friend/chew toy, Speccy, who isn't. The series had a unique, distinctly off-kilter look thanks to its complex production - originally, Angry Kid was brought to life through the process of pixilation, with a live action actor swapping out masks in between frames, while Lil' Sis and Speccy were portrayed by life-size puppets. It would be wrong to suggest that pixilation is inherently ill-suited to whimsy (A Chairy Tale, by Canadian film-makers Norman McLaren and Claude Jutra, is pretty firm evidence to the contrary), but there is nevertheless something so much more uncanny about the results than regular stop motion (note: later installments forgo the mask process and use CGI to animate the characters' faces, which pulls off the incredible feat of looking even more unsettling while perhaps lacking the same degree of personality). Unlike Rex The Runt, which wound up being pitched to essentially the wrong audience when it debuted, I don't think you were likely to mistake Angry Kid for anything overly kid-friendly. It looked way too nightmarish from the outset - a quality that made it perfectly apt for delivering a cautionary tale about the planet being taken down a drastically wrong path. If there's an Aardman property that nails down the messy self-destructiveness of the human condition, it's Angry Kid.
By 2007, Angry Kid's grisly features were a familiar sight among animation fans wont to straying from the beaten track, with two series and a 23-minute special under his belt. This latest installment, Gridlock, saw Angry Kid and the rest of the cast recount the experience of being trapped in a traffic jam of apocalyptic proportions...in song form. Gridlock is a full-blown music video, pivoting on a pop-rap comedy number that, much to my chagrin, was not actually released as a single in any form. Not even a crummy download. Although, oddly enough, Angry Kid had only released a record the year prior, "Handbags", another pop-rap comedy number that was ostensibly about some amalgamation of football and handbag-wielding but was (I presume) all a metaphor for masturbation. I happen to think that "Gridlock" was better. When you hear it, you'll understand why I'm so bummed that it didn't strive for greater exposure - it is gloriously infectuous. Most of the rapping is provided by Angry Kid himself, although Lil' Sis, who seldom speaks at all in the series proper, here gets a surprisingly generous number of lines, courtesy of Beth Chalmers.
Gridlock uses the series' then-trademark combination of live action, pixilation and puppetry (and some 2D animation) to create a disorientating picture of the world going to Hell as viewed from the backseat of your daddy's car. It's unsparing in its depiction of the uncomfortable realities of road travel, and there's a harrowing moment with an asthmatic Speccy facing the build-up of exhaust fumes, although the eco themes become most explicit in the final verse, when Angry Kid references the looming climate catastrophe: "Now I've been told/Soon it won't be cold/Can't wait, I'm gonna buy a ton of lotion." Which sounded like a farcically bone-headed response to the environmental crisis, until that horrifying day when we woke up and discovered that Angry Kid and people of his mentality were now running BBC Bitesize. At the end, he concedes that, "We should have heard the boffins and their warning", but professes that he's enjoying the calamity of seeing the world come apart at the seams (a metaphor evoked directly in one of its sister shorts, Unravel). He scoots off through a smoggy playground where the children are decked out in gas masks, before finally getting his comeuppance via the wrath of Dad.
There are obvious visual nods throughout to Bob Dylan's proto music video for "Subterranean Homesick Blues", but overall I'm tempted to theorize that Walsh set out to create an inversion on the music video to R.E.M's 1992 single "Everybody Hurts", which also involved a traffic jam and climaxed with all of the occupants abandoning their vehicles and walking away in unison. Gridlock takes things in a slightly different direction, with everybody leaving their vehicles and turning on one another in their carbon-addled rage - which, in all honesty, seems like a much more credible outcome. More than just the story of a bog standard traffic jam, doesn't the whole thing play like a convincing metaphor for the Earth teetering over the brink of catastrophe? Congested, stinking and with nowhere else to go, odds are that we won't be feeling a whole lot of patience or empathy for one another.
No comments:
Post a Comment