If you want succinct encapsulation of Ronald McDonald's 21st century trajectory from colourful bastion of childhood pleasures to sinister anathema in these health-conscious, coulrophobic times, look no further than his appearance in the 2009 animated short Logorama, which got an intense amount of mileage out of envisioning the smiling clown (voiced here by Bob Stephenson) as the kind of sociopathic, gung-ho criminal who would hold up diners and take children hostage. Basically they made him their equivalent of the Joker, a move that seems motivated by a roguish desire to subvert the character's kid-friendly branding whilst teasing out the more sinister qualities suggested by his outlandish appearance, and feels fully in sync with the pall that had been cast on McDonald's in the post-Super Size Me age - culminating in a relatively unsubtle sight gag, toward the end of the film, where Ronald is ultimately felled by a sign promoting Weight Watchers.
Logorama was directed by François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain and brought to life by French animation studio H5. The 16-minute film imagines an alternate Los Angeles in which all of the inhabitants are familiar advertising characters. Not only are the people themselves all logos, the environment in which they live is comprised primarily of logos - the buildings, the vehicles, the street-lighting, the plant life, the birds flying overhead...it's impossible to look anywhere in this world without having your eyeballs assaulted by a multitude of brands and symbols. The corporate logo is an intrinsic, inescapable part of this universe's very underpinnings - with the implicit commentary that the world we inhabit is effectively no different. You could say that Logorama amounts to 16 minutes worth of non-stop product placement, but product placement so densely layered and relentless that it serves to shine a spotlight on our relationship with branding. Many of the featured logos have become such a familiar part of our everyday landscape that we can go about our business barely noticing them at all. Certainly, Logorama wants us to notice, and to be acutely aware of just how many of the danged things we have surrounding us at any given time. Which is, on one level, a whole lot of fun - a sizeable chunk of the film's appeal lies in observing the plethora of ways in which the individual logos have been wittily and logically incorporated into this universe, with so many in-jokes and background gags in every frame that it's impossible to ingest them all in one sitting. The sprawling visual canvas of the logo-fied Los Angeles is a real feast for the hawk-eyed viewer looking to play an elaborate game of Where's Wally/Waldo? with favourite mascots and signage. But there is something intensely overstimulated, overstuffed and overbearing about the sheer onslaught of images and information simultaneously vying for our attention. What's more, by reducing the physical components of this universe to the codes and shorthands endemic to the world of marketing, Logorama suggests that an inevitable outcome of a world centred around corporations and consumerism is a disconnect from reality. This preoccupation is present from the opening shot, which shows a close-up of the logo for Malibu brand rum, with the silhouettes of two palm trees against a setting sun, before panning away to reveal this static image to be a billboard advertisement, and the actual palm trees rustling in the adjacent landscape to be rendered in identically flat, two-dimensional outlines - bringing to mind Godfrey Reggio's remarks, when discussing the meaning of his 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi, about " the transiting from old nature, or the natural environment as our host of life for human habitation, into a technological milieu, into mass technology as the environment of life".
These concerns are articulated in an early dialogue, when two Michelin Men (the cops of this universe) debate the ethics of exhibiting wild animals in captivity. One of them, Mitch (voice of Sherman Augustus), states that he finds zoos depressing: "That cheetah can run like a motherfucker, but in the zoo? He ain't got enough room to hit second gear. I mean it ain't like they're in their natural habitat." His partner Mike (Stephenson) insists that the animals you see in zoos have all been "rescued" and would be dead if they'd stayed in their natural habitats, which Mitch argues only makes the situation all the more fucked up. All this talk of natural habitats calls attention to the extreme artifice of their own environs - and by extension, our own - begging the underlying question as to the extent to which our existence at the heart of all this consumerism has benefited or stifled us, and indeed the world at large. The question is echoed when we go inside the Los Angeles Zoo, which is populated by animal logos, including the NBC peacock, the WWF panda and the MGM lion, and where the exhibits substituting for the animals' natural terrain are, unsurprisingly, also logos - Linux penguins are seen
sliding off of an exhibit comprised of the logo for Miko brand ice cream, Playboy
rabbits are living down burrows in the Paramount mountain and, in one of the film's subtlest but most bitter background gags, the greenery in the animals' enclosures is supplied by a company dedicated to global palm oil investment.
Logorama won the award for Best Animated Short at the 82nd Academy Awards in 2010, which I recall causing some shock waves at the time, since going in most had expected Wallace and Gromit's latest, A Matter of Loaf and Death, to take home the glory. As a lifelong Wallace and Gromit fan, I was initially disappointed by this outcome, but when I finally had a chance to watch Logorama, I put my biases aside and found that I couldn't really fault the Academy for their decision. After all, Wallace and Gromit's triumph in the Animated Feature category for Curse of The Were-Rabbit was still a relatively recent memory. For Aardman devotees, A Matter of Loaf and Death represented something pretty special in itself - the duo's first television outing in twelve years - but from the Academy's perspective, Wallace and Gromit were Oscar mainstays who'd proven their mettle enough times already, and it doesn't surprise me that the freshness and boldness of a one-off like Logorama should manage to upstage them on this occasion. I could honestly say that I had never seen anything else quite like Logorama. The closest thing would probably be the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror segment "Attack of The 50-Foot Eyesores", in bringing together multiple advertising mascots (or parodies thereof) to make a satirical point about the oppressive nature of branding and consumerism, but even then that doesn't get close to scratching the surface. It probably also didn't hurt that Logorama could be perceived as having topicality on its side - while the short's creators have denied that they intended for its apocalyptic climax to be read as an allegory for the Global Financial Crisis (states producer Nicolas Schmerkin in an interview with Animation Magazine, "we started this film so long ago that we had no idea that a financial crisis was going to cripple the world!"), it nevertheless felt like an appropriate film for the moment.
Logorama has more on its mind than simply sly social commentary; it's
also a lovingly-observed demolition of action movie cliches, many of which
would not seem at all out of place in the McBain skits on The Simpsons - not least the supposed heroes' tendency to take out numerous innocent bystanders while attempting to close in on their villain. Soon after watching Logorama
for the first time, I remember showing it to a friend, and he was truly appalled
at the sequence where the Red and Yellow M&Ms meet a grisly demise,
run over by Mike and Mitch during their high-speed pursuit of Ronald
("Where's a cop when you need one?" asks Yellow, having narrowly avoided
being ploughed down by Ronald, right before irony decides to get brutal
on his sugar-coated hide). Alas, the M&Ms aren't the only victims
of police incompetence - at the beginning of the chase, they manage to
twice knock over Fido Dido (and if Fido survived that second hit, I
suspect he might require a wheelchair for the rest of his life), and
during Ronald's hold-up of the diner Mitch winds up accidentally
shooting one of his hostages, Mr Peanut, resulting in the equivalent of
the anthropomorphic peanut's head blowing up and his brains splattering. In Logorama, nothing is sacred - Haribo Boy (Matt Winston) sustains a bloody head injury, and Colonel Sanders (who is, for all intents and purposes, an old man with a cane) gets crushed by a collapsing Slim Jims sign. The whole thing is a euphoric cavalcade of cruelty and carnage, an inherently chaotic world frantically attempting to hold itself together and maintain the illusion of order, until finally, with a little extra help from Mother Nature, a breaking point is reached, and it all comes crashing down in an epic frenzy. It's here that, having invested so much wit and imagination into
constructing this world out of signs and logos, the films' creators get
to experience flip-side of all that, in taking as much gleeful relish as
possible in having it all come apart at the seams. Sensing the
impending destruction, the zoo animals panic, break out of their
enclosures and rampage through L.A. in a desperate bid to flee the
disaster zone. The earth splits, buildings topple, oil erupts and the city is flooded, leaving the debris of this once jam-packed metropolis drifting dolefully atop.
There are points where the limitations of the universe in Logorama seem indicative of our own societal deficiencies. You might notice, for example, that the film's heroine, Esso Girl (Aja Evans), is one
of only a scant number of female advertising mascots represented throughout
- as Alaux and de Crécy note in the aforementioned Animation Magazine interview, "the world of the logotype is quite patriarchal". It's probably no coincidence that Esso Girl is easily the most sympathetic character in the film, and the bond she forges with the prepubescent Big Boy (Joel Michaely) as the two of them are being held at gunpoint by Ronald is the closest thing the story has to an emotional centre. Compared to the Michelin Men, whose thuggish macho antics are, in practice, no more reparatory than any of Ronald's actions (and in Mitch's cases, ultimately result in his own demise), Esso Girl's gentler, more empathic approach to heroism is upheld as redemptive - not only is Esso Girl one of the few characters left standing by the end of the film, she manages to save Big Boy as well. But these are qualities on which the world of Logorama places little value, with Esso Girl being subject to repeated indignities at the hands of her male compatriots, facing jeers and sexual harassment from Julius Pringles (David Fincher), aka Mr P, and his Hot & Spicy counterpart (Andrew Kevin Walker). Even Big Boy, who comes to look up to her as his protector during the increasingly escalating crisis, is visibly regarding her through the lens of his awakening sexual curiosity all the while - a dynamic carried over to the end of their characters' arc, when, having survived the string of disasters that have presumably wiped out most of the population of Los Angeles, Big Boy and Esso Girl are seen lying side by side on their own private island, as the latter takes a bite out of an Apple Inc. apple. Paradise lost or paradise regained? The symbolism is double-edged; Esso Girl's successful navigation out of the collapsing city and her deliverance of Big Boy could be seen as her triumphing over the patriarchy that has subjugated and abused her (and seemed all-too eager to destroy itself), although Big Boy's adjacent salacity could appear to parallel the destruction with the onset of sexual desire, the disruption of the established order so that the seed of desire that begot it in the first instance can begin the cycle anew.
Despite the downfall of this ad-centric culture, the final sequence reasserts the inescapability of the corporate logo, pulling back to reveal that outer space is no more ad-free than is life on Earth (itself reduced to nothing more than the Universal logo). The epilogue consists of a series of jokes in which various logos are shown to have taken the place of planets and galaxies (some, such as Mars and Milky Way, are a natural fit), and to all revolve around a giant Pepsi logo. The last word goes to Ronald McDonald, who reappears after the end-credits, having inexplicably survived the destruction, to remind us that wherever we think we've got the universe regimented into orderly categories, chaos inevitably endures: "I'm lovin' it!" he bellows, into the vacuum of space.
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