Guided Muscle (aka Incredulous Coyotes Need Not Apply)

If I were to pick out one short that, for me, represented the absolute cream of the Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner crop, I'd inevitably go to Chuck Jones' 1955 masterpiece Guided Muscle, a choice that I'll confess has relatively little to do with the coyote's endeavours to stop that infernal ground cuckoo in its tracks. Guided Muscle is like an exquisite sandwich, its filling wedged between two particularly flavoursome slices of bread. The filling is still an essential and gratifying part of the experience, but it's the bread I'm really here for. As a young child, I had Guided Muscle on a VHS tape along with eight other Coyote and Road Runner shorts (part of a series of Looney Tunes releases put out by Videolog to coincide with Bug Bunny's 50th birthday); it always stood out to me as the single biggest oddity of that collection, all on account of how it was bookended, with an opening sequence I found strangely unsettling (in the best possible way) and a closing punchline that for a long while just left me baffled. We might as well start with the ending, for it is the juicier of the two - after suffering one defeat too many in his ever-fruitless pursuit of the road-runner and becoming charred by an explosion he had devised, set up and activated, a visibly irate Wile withdraws from the chase, producing a sign that reads, "Wanted: One gullible coyote. Apply to Manager of this theater." He then signs off by pulling the "That's All Folks!" card across the screen. Cue "Merry-Go-Round Broke Down".

What's going on here might seem blatantly obvious to adult eyes, but appreciate that, at seven years old, this was a difficult joke for me to wrap my head around for three different reasons:

1. I was unaware of some of the ways in which American English differed from British English, and couldn't be 100% certain that a "theater" was actually the same thing as a "theatre". On top of which, I would have been thinking of a theatre in terms of a playhouse rather than a cinema.
2. At that age, I also had no idea what "gullible" meant.
3. Like a lot of children who grew up watching Looney Tunes shorts on television or VHS, I had little inkling of how old they actually were, or of the fact that they hailed from another era completely, where cartoons were screened theatrically before feature films. I would have assumed that they were made for television like every other cartoon I was in the business of watching. Gags where characters interacted with a film strip and a white screen still made a degree of sense (I appreciated that the characters were bending reality and going beyond the confines of their world), but something like this I had no real reference for.

Eventually I figured out that what Wile was doing here was tending his resignation, and over time all of the other details became clear. It (briefly) put the fanciful, none-too-serious notion into my head that it wasn't necessarily the same coyote we saw chasing the road-runner in every short - Guided Muscle was only the third cartoon on this tape, so did that mean for that the remaining six we were seeing how that gullible new applicant was faring? A darker thought crossed my mind that the coyote perhaps wasn't surviving some of the more extreme of his backfired schemes and was being repeatedly replaced by lookalikes in between shorts (I mean, doppelgangers were out there - just look to the Ralph Wolf shorts). On that note, how could I be certain it was even the same road-runner being chased every time? What if the coyote was obtaining the occasional victory when no one was watching and new specimens were coming along to fill the void? After all, this is the closest a Looney Tunes series got to replicating the kind of set-up you saw in nature documentaries (the constant use of Acme products notwithstanding) - the subjects didn't talk and were observed in their natural habitat, engaging in the same age-old battle of hunger vs elusiveness that's defined the rhythm of life for countless generations of predator and prey. The individual participants were constantly changing, even if the basic narrative remained the same. Obviously, I appreciate that none of that idle thinking holds water, for Looney Tunes shorts typically adhere to their own self-contained continuity. What happens in one is unlikely to have any direct bearing on the next. Case in point, Guided Muscle was already the seventh of the coyote vs road-runner shorts, yet the opening sequence gives the impression that Wile is encountering Road and getting acquainted with his incredible acceleration for the very first time. In that regard, I like the way in which it tells a complete story and how the opening and closing sequences, while they may not directly echo one another, show Wile's fixation coming full circle. 

The intention behind the opening sequence was much less of a puzzle to me as a child - that Wile was apparently desperate enough to be preparing a discarded tin can as a meal spoke volumes about his impoverishment and how badly he was eating in general - but it always disturbed me, even if he ultimately stops short of attempting to eat this most exotic of delicacies. What makes the sequence so glorious is how beautifully straight it's initially played, with the coyote going about his business with the can as if this were the most normal behaviour on Earth. There's no hint of any kind of craze or desperation in his eyes. It's only when he sits down to try cutting the damned thing with a knife and fork that his expression warps into something significantly more exaggerated, as the grim reality of his situation sinks in. The abruptness of this transition is what really spooked me about this sequence, not least for how Wile breaks the fourth wall, shooting his demoralised gaze directly at the viewer as if the awareness that he's being watched has made him self-conscious of his own wretchedness. He cannot face his audience and degrade himself any further. There is, in addition, an excessive amount of red around Wile's eyes during this particular moment, due to what I presume to an inking error, but it adds fortuitously to the overall uncanniness of the scene. Another detail I particularly love is the broken bottle of pink liquid positioned to the right of the coyote's dinner plate that's obviously intended to give the appearance of a fine rosé wine, although who knows it actually contains? Wile discards it along with the can, indicating that whatever it was, it likely wasn't more palatable.

Wile's assigned Latin name, Eatibus almost anythingus, informs us that he isn't exactly a picky eater, but we've already witnessed where his limits lie. He's not reckless enough to try forcing something as inedible as a tin can (no matter how thoroughly boiled) through his digestive system. By the same token, he decides at the end of the short that he isn't reckless enough to keep pursuing the road-runner and suffering injury after injury in his attempt to pinpoint some kind of fatal chink in the bird's armour - to do so would be as delusional as his prior belief that he could cure his hunger pains by chowing down discarded tin cans. The problem of his hunger remains unresolved, but he he's least seen the futility of his chasing and taken a step back (for now, anyhow). I will admit, even if the ending is no longer a point of confusion to me, that there is a degree to which I still find it somewhat troubling, specifically in the notice's request for a "gullible" coyote. There is subtle humor in the implication that the hypothetical applicant would have to be self-aware enough to recognise themselves as gullible, but it also indicates that the position is to be regarded as a trap, raising questions about who is the predator in this scenario and who is the real prey. Although Wile initially sees Road as his salvation, he is in fact the perfect bait, luring Wile ever deeper down the path of Sisyphean endeavour. He's on a quest to attain the unattainable, doing things a little differently every time, determined to keep going long after he's exhausted every possible option. It's what makes the scrawny fleabag so endearing. But it's also what, according to Chuck Jones, in the series of (contested) rules he reportedly laid out for the series, makes him such a thoroughgoing fanatic, citing George Santayana's definition of the fanatic as "one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim."

It's in Wile's apparent resignation at the end of Guided Muscle that we see shades of the grind experienced by the coyote's aforementioned doppelganger, Ralph Wolf, with the implication that his designated role as the predator in this equation is a job like any other. Of course, the Sam and Ralph shorts were entirely firm on where the boundaries lay between the characters' personal and professional lives, by having the wolf and sheepdog drop their antagonistic demeanours the second the clock struck 5pm and head off home to their neat suburban houses, wishing each other well for the evening. In Wile's case, and in spite of Jones' insistence that he could stop any time if he weren't a fanatic, it's not clear if walking away is even an option. Compared to Sam and Ralph, there is no other world for him to retreat to, and no differentiation between the characters' assumed and "real" personas. What does the coyote even have to do in his sparse terrain other than to fixate on catching the road-runner (or experiment with tin cans)? Something I've always enjoyed about the Coyote and Road Runner shorts is their purity - the characters never ventured beyond their stretch of the desert and for the most part seemed to be the only inhabitants that actually dwelt there. Rarely do other parties get involved, the only persistent hint of a world that exists beyond coming in the supply of Acme products that Wile is (inexplicably) able to have sent his way, and even then, their products appear to exist purely in service of the coyote's endeavours, given their peculiar and often niche nature. One of my favourite gags in Guided Muscle occurs when Wile resolves to try tarring and feathering the road-runner and consults a publication entitled How To Tar And Feather A Road Runner; the existence of such a book should be ludicrous enough in itself, but the subtitle indicating that demand for the book is such that it's already in its 10th printing takes the joke to the next level. Another sequence involves an outside intrusion in the form of the red truck that comes thundering down the narrow road Wile has just greased, although you get the uncanny impression that this truck (not unlike that from the movie Duel) exists not as a means of mobility for any flesh and blood participant of some broader universe, but as force of calamity pulled from nowhere to inflict further misfortune upon our hero. The road runs throughout the desert, not as a means for travellers to pass through it, but foremost to the lay the grounds for the ongoing chase (such conditions are, after all, demanded by the very name that one of the parties bears, both as an individual and as a species).

One of the great underlying absurdities of the Sam and Ralph shorts was in the question of who was actually employing the two canines to go to war with one another on a daily basis from 8 to 5 - the depiction of a sheepdog as a working stiff made a degree of sense, but what kind of sheep farming business would also be hiring a wolf to stir up conflict within that time? One interpretation is that it's all being orchestrated for the benefit of the viewer, so that we could derive amusement from their ostensible enmity, until they've fulfilled the day's quota for cartoon mayhem and get to retire for the night. The ending to Guided Muscle, with its more explicit reference to the physical space from which the short's original audience would have observed the action, has Wile exhibiting such a self-awareness that entertaining the viewer is own his raison d'être, acknowledging that his giving up on Road Runner requires another coyote to take this place. Such is our fascination with seeing a malnourished coyote suffer endless pratfalls in pursuit of a terrestrial cuckoo. I like to think that by the end of the short he's dropped more than just the delusion that the road-runner is a viable quarry. Up until now, Wile has obviously regarded the viewer as his ally and confidant, judging by the series of gestures and glances he directs toward the camera as he goes about his predatory business. The first of his ill-fated schemes, which involves affixing an arrowhead to his nose and firing himself with a large bow, contains a particularly harrowing (and hilarious) moment where he turns his head elatedly toward the viewer, expecting them to share in his excitement that things are running according to plan, only to get blind-sided by the saguaro cactus directly in front of him (which proceeds to fall off of a cliff, taking him down with it). His trust in the audience is flagrantly misplaced. In the end, Wile appears to have fallen out of love with the viewer as much as he has the concept of consuming Road, having seen though the exploitative nature of their relationship. Any coyote applying to fill in his position would need to be gullible, not just in the belief that they can actually catch the road-runner, but in the belief that showbiz is glamorous and the audience is on their side and not deriving a tremendous kick from their ill fortune.

Conversely, the coyote is also the party with whom the viewer overwhelmingly identifies, which makes that relationship an intrinsically masochistic one. By now it's pretty well-established that if you were rooting for the road-runner, you were doing it wrong, when it's Wile who possesses all of the attractive qualities. The vulnerabilities, the drive to attain something better than the hand life dealt him, and the dogged attachment to his beloved pipe dream, no matter how thoroughly and repeatedly the universe insists on bending to beat it out of him. He keeps going, hoping that with enough persistence and variation he will procure a better result and taste the kind of success the world seems intent on denying him. For that reason, he has our sympathies, and it's easy to see in him a mirror to our own fallibilities, adding an extra shade to the coyote's final implication of the audience in Guided Muscle. By evoking the audience's immediate space, and indicating that the application process would be happening right there within their very theatre, he is evoking the viewer's own potential as a candidate to take his place. The short ends with the insinuation that the viewer, like the coyote, is at risk of becoming caught in a trap of their own making. The bait is laid out right in front of them, even as it calls attention to its deceptive nature with its specification for a gullible applicant. Of course, the signage also specifies that the applicant should be a coyote (this part is underlined for emphasis), which would appear to automatically disqualify all of us non-coyotes in the theatre. But perhaps we could become coyotes, if only a figurative sense. Scrawny little underdogs who believe we deserve better and won't let that light of tenacity go out, even as the odds are perpetually stacked against us. How do we know when we've crossed the slippery line from hard graft and determination into self-destructive obsession? If eating discarded tin cans is our only alternative, does it make any difference either way? 

Logo Case Study: Pixar's Luxo Lamp

2026 marks the fortieth anniversary of Pixar's founding (when the Graphics Group, a special effects team that made up part of Lucasfilm's Computer Division, was acquired by Steve Jobs and established as an independent company), so what better time to pay tribute to the plucky little desk lamp who's been attached to their output for as long as they've been making feature films?

I can remember a time when the existence of Luxo Jr. was a secret, an intriguing little Easter egg you'd be rewarded with should you make it all the way through the closing credits on the VHS release of Toy Story. Nowadays, we're fully accustomed to the lamp popping in at the start of each Pixar release as well as after, but that wasn't the case with their premier feature. Although Toy Story was heavily touted in its marketing as the first completely computer-animated feature film, Pixar themselves had essentially no brand recognition among the general public in the mid-1990s, and there does seem to have been a mindset that it should be packaged foremost as a Disney film - as something bold, new and exciting, but under the warmth and familiarity of the Disney banner. On the original print of Toy Story, the Disney logo had the opening all to itself, while the Pixar logo was tucked away discreetly at the tail-end of the picture. And quite frankly, that's where little Luxo thrived. For me, the hopping lamp was poetic, a perfectly quirky manifestation of the fact that we were venturing a little far beyond our comfort zone and were getting dangerously close to the spooky oblivion that awaited at the end of every VHS tape. He came bounding into view, eager to play with the I in the text that spelled out the company's name, only for these larks to be cut short by the I's inability to withstand his rambunctious thumping atop it, before some unseen power turned the lights out on him. Luxo Jr., now substituting for the ravaged I, would direct his bulb toward the camera (his eye, for all intents and purposes, so a possible visual pun), emitting a final warm glow into the abyss, before that too was extinguished with a genial click. At the time, Disney were in the business of inserting extra previews at the end of their tapes, so we still had a couple of items to get through before we would also be plunged into total blackness (in this case, a promo for the few blessed Disney releases that got to live permanently outside of the vault, and an ad for an interactive Toy Story CD Rom that supposed that Woody and Buzz might emerge from your PC screen as soon as you left the room), but the refuge and excitement of the main feature was now behind us. I can think of few closing logos that quite so slickly captured that feeling of "Show's over, eject" as the frisky desk lamp that saw out Toy Story.

Of course, as Pixar's stature in the entertainment industry grew there was no reason to keep Luxo confined to the pictures' sign-offs, and he became a familiar, reassuring sight in their introductions as well (including updated prints of the first Toy Story). For the most part, the sequence works as aptly as an opener, with the enthusiasm the lamp exhibits at the prospect of getting to tamper with the Pixar lettering mirroring the audience's anticipation for whatever experience the studio is about to serve up next. All the same, an important distinction was maintained between the opening and closing versions of the logo, indicating that the powers that be were entirely aware of the special power the lamp's antics had exuded at the end of their original feature. In the standard opening version of the logo, the sequence simply fades to black as Luxo's gaze turns directly toward the cinema. The intense glow in the darkness and the concluding click happen only in the end version, preserving their association with that sense of finality. I will admit to being a total purist when it comes to the latter version of the logo, meaning that I strongly disapprove of any variant in which music from the end-credits continues to play as little Luxo makes his entrance. I don't mind one iota when the reverse occurs, and the opening version of the logo is overlaid with the score from the film's beginnings, but as I see it, the sound design is too quintessential a part of the closing experience to jettison. It wasn't just the click and the total immersion in darkness that signalled that we'd reached the end of this particular journey. Every last thud and squishing sound that accompanied Luxo's movements, in addition to making the logo feel all the more alive, also emphasised the vast emptiness of the space around him, like he was hopping around a deserted venue after everyone else at Pixar had packed up and gone home for the night. The narrative I always projected onto the sequence was that Luxo was looking to eke a scrap of added enjoyment from the experience, not wanting the thrill of the feature we'd just watched be over, but his efforts were brought to an abrupt halt once he'd obliterated the I, at which point he was left shut inside the Pixar studio as the last of the employees switched off the lights. Which perhaps sounds a little bleak, but I was fairly confident that the last click was voluntary, and that Luxo was embracing in the darkness, signifying the completion of this particular Pixar project, and the promise of the next one to come. The lamp wasn't deserted, merely dormant.

I know that there are a number of folks out there who report finding Luxo Jr. unnerving in their school-aged years, on account of that fourth wall-breaking moment where he surveys you with his glowing, inhuman "eye", but in the main I think his impact on viewers was overwhelmingly disarming. I was utterly fascinated by the character - never mind toys, there was something innately beautiful in the suggestion that desk lamps could be brought to life and exhibit playful personalities. It all made sense, for you could look at a desk lamp and pick out the outline of a creature, with a head, elongated neck and foot, and Pixar were really able to make the most of that, imbuing their subject with a convincing heart and motion without the need to implement additional anthropomorphic features. It's all in the movements and the gestures - the eager spontaneity as he races into the picture and the lettering appears to catch his attention, the frantic confusion as he attempts to pinpoint the flattened I, and the stunned abashment with which his displacement of the unfortunate letter sinks in. Meanwhile, the various little creaks and clangs emitted by Luxo's metallic form are assertions of his fundamental otherness; in working within the limitations of something as inanimate and inhuman as a lamp, Pixar managed to give him a vitality and expressiveness that is uniquely his own. The patch of light that accompanies Luxo and is carefully matched to his every movement (a demonstration of Pixar's capacity to have light and shadow interact with their computer-generated landscapes) is another invaluable touch. 

At the time, I was vaguely aware that the character had originated from a short film, Luxo Jr. (John Lassester, 1986), thanks to a documentary I'd seen close to the UK release of Toy Story in the spring of 1996. I'm pretty sure Luxo Jr. came up somewhere in that, although my main interest in said documentary had been in getting glimpses of the upcoming feature and a lot of the background information went over my head (still, I've distinct memories of gasping when they played the test footage Lasseter had prepared for a proposed adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are, and being properly gutted when they subsequently indicated that the project had been canned). Like many people, I didn't see the short in its entirety until it did the theatrical rounds, attached to Pixar's 1999 release Toy Story 2 (though it had previously been available on the 1996 VHS release Tiny Toy Stories), with added text explaining that "This is why we have a hopping lamp in our logo", as if it had been a matter of serious confusion beforehand. Originally created as a technical demonstration of what the Pixar Image Computer could do, it creates an irresistible narrative, cramming a lot into its efficient two minute running time - the bond between Luxo Jr. and his "parent" lamp Luxo Sr., Luxo Jr.'s education on death, or at least consequence (thankfully, the ball he flattens doesn't actually appear to be alive), and the endearing visual punchline where Jr. rebounds from his setback and with the renewed confidence to take on an even bigger escapade in the form of that beach ball. Some of the narrative detail from the short was transplanted directly into the logo - notably Junior flattening the I in the same manner in which he does the smaller ball, although in the original short it was Luxo Sr. who made the fourth wall-breaking gesture of looking directly to the camera. The electrical cord that trailed Luxo Jr. in the original short (another crucial feature in establishing the characters' "lampness") was not incorporated into the logo, presumably in the interests of greater fluidity.

The logo worked its magic, implanting the Pixar brand name firmly inside my skull and getting me genuinely excited for what might be next on the studio's horizon. It offered such an intriguing contrast to Disney's logo - one was elegant and grandiose, while the other was quirky and ultra-modern - making it clear early on that Pixar's output was going to have a touch and character quite distinct from that of the Mouse. It was likewise a much busier logo than the grey shape that had accompanied Pixar's preceding projects, boldly announcing that a new dynamic era had begun. Mind you, the Beveled Square with a Dent still has its charm. It seems like such a primitive piece of computer animation now, but once upon a time it was the future.

Life and Stuff (aka Not Asleep, Not Awake, Always Tired)

About midway through Kumar Satkunarasa's Life and Stuff, the protagonist meets someone who shares their philosophy about life being harder for people who aim to exist than for those who just want to survive. It's a philosophy that Life and Stuff automatically calls into question, through the images that it juxtaposes with this statement. The people who are supposedly trying to exist are all shown in silhouette, bustling about their nondescript business in an indistinct mass. Its visual representation of a person who just wants to survive, meanwhile, is a picture of an impoverished child, who seems real, and their plight immediate, but is also invisible to these indifferent silhouettes. The aspiration to exist is exposed as an absurdity, being the luxury of those who do not have to worry about day-to-day survival. But it's also in this statement that one of the key tensions of the short is vocalised - the need to feel that our being in the world is having some kind of meaningful impact versus the feeling of drifting passively through. It seems significant that it occurs about midway through the runtime, and is spoken by the only character whose words the protagonist seems (momentarily) inclined to take heed of, and who doesn't immediately fade into the backdrop of their life. It is, in truth, a mere extension of an idea that had already occurred to the protagonist earlier on, when they'd arrived home from school to find their parents arguing over the TV remote, and wondered if anybody really grows up, or just grows old? This is the uneasy concept at the heart of Satkunarasa's four minute piece, which travels through the entirety of an individual's lifetime in a gut-churning pace - it isn't simply that life is short, but that it potentially has no cumulative effect. That, far from progressing our way from bright potential to silver wisdom, we might be stumbling down lonely corridor after lonely corridor, ending up nowhere. The protagonist feels perpetually callow no matter where they are in life, waiting for some epiphany or final meaning that never comes to them. Even as they lie on their deathbed, their life fails to flash before their eyes and put it into any kind of coherent perspective. 

Life and Stuff was completed for Satkunarasa's degree while studying at Bournemouth University, and combines computer animation and various repurposed clips and images to create a collage effect, a representation of a life pulled together from various odds and ends, amounting to a string of memories as ambivalent as the short's title. We are spurred ever onward through these humdrum chronicles by the relentlessly forward motion of the camera, never stopping to linger for long at any of the transient sights as we're whisked along an assortment of drab domestic spaces, sunlit beaches and, in the short's most grotesque sequence, down a toilet u-bend to mingle with life's literal shit. Satkunarasa presents it all with the same doggedly sardonic tone as his 60 second piece One Day, regarding the mundane details of a single day in the life of an office worker, the highlight of which was an idle train of philosophical thought they swiftly berated themselves for daring to momentarily entertain. The title was cheekily deceptive, appearing to suggest that something eventful might occur, but in actuality indicating that this self-contained day was much the same as any other. Life and Stuff is a macroscopic expansion on that same theme, guiding us through a complete lifetime in a way that is implied to representative of the broader human experience. The crucial difference is the shift in perspective. One Day was narrated in the first person, suggesting that Satkunarasa might be speaking directly from his own experience. Life and Stuff is told using second person narration, switching the short's tone to that of an instructional manual and the protagonist to a hypothetical; even details that would appear distinguishing, such as their larger than average head at birth, are presented as expected bumps in the road, thrown in to make their being that much more challenging. We follow them from their days as a disaffected school kid navigating the confusion of adolescence, through their menial career as a warehouse worker and into their twilight years of contemplating that they now have more to look back upon than forward to, an aching realisation related somewhat incongruously in Satkunarasa's distinctly youthful-sounding voice. We'd do well to keep in mind that Life and Stuff is a student film, and it conveys the fear of what lies ahead from a certain vantage point, from which old age is a distant threat on the horizon that still looms frighteningly large in its inevitability. These are the anxieties of a student gearing up to enter the real world, someone who is really only at the beginning of their journey but can already feel the passage of time taking its toll as their youth already seems behind them. Even its earliest stages, there are haunting reminders of how this story must invariably end. The protagonist's conception is heralded by a leaf falling from a near-bare tree. The skeleton in the school classroom is a grisly symbol of the bodily destruction that awaits us all, although its vacant eye sockets and hollow grin are equally suggestive of the emotional disconnect that keeps staring the protagonist in the face.

I saw Life and Stuff while it was making the festival rounds in late 2012, and the thing that stayed with me about it was its depiction of an overwhelming loneliness, that sense of being adrift in a world where everything seems to be functioning around you, not with you. A moment that particularly stood out was the one where Satkunarasa seemed to be evoking the visual language of Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (1982), when the protagonist gets their first job cleaning an office skyscraper and is troubled by a timelapse sequence of a busy city that seems to be thriving just fine in their absence. It put me in mind of that specific sequence from Reggio's film that occurs about an hour in, when we glimpse a solitary worker through the windows of an office, their life running parallel to the constant flow of traffic outside. In general, the people in the "Grid" portion of Koyaanisqatsi move in sped-up swarms, making it difficult to pick out and focus on any particular person. The metropolis is depicted as a chaotic Babel in which the voice of individual is all but unintelligible, with this one shot giving us a fleeting impression of an isolated figure subsisting in a world that seems totally unaware of their existence. In Satkunarasa's short, a running feature is the persistent feeling of distance that accompanies the protagonist throughout life. A younger sibling is mentioned precisely once, and purely to be the set-up of a joke involve a Kinder Egg, the parents are forgotten as soon as the protagonist sets foot into the working world, and the schoolmates and colleagues exist only to emphasise the protagonist's alienation. The female companion acquired during the short's middle section is the only secondary character who gets close enough for any semblance of a genuine connection to be formed, and for the protagonist to learn a few of the traits that mark her out as an individual, such as her fondness for Sesame Street and for rouge lipstick. This is presented at first as an almost miraculous intersection between two souls on equally adrift trajectories (the coffeehouse sequence where their bond is solidified shows the rest of the world buzzing by in a very Koyaanisqatsi-esque fashion), although the prospect of it bringing mutual healing is too romantic to weather Satkunarasa's unrelenting sardonicism. The longer they stay together, the more their common understanding deteriorates (something implied to coincide with their waning sexual intimacy), and the distinguishing traits of our Sesame Street-watching significant other are distorted into signifiers of insurmountable differences.

 

Truth be told, and in spite of that persistent feeling of alienation, I don't think the protagonist of Life and Stuff leads such a bad life. The breakdown of that long-term relationship is the most upsetting thing that happens to them, and even then it ends on more of an anti-climactic note than an openly traumatic one. Indeed, they get to finish up in a position that many would envy, with all their years of manual labour paying off and enabling them to retire to a coastal community by the equator to live an idyllic existence of fishing and looking up at the stars (of course, if we read between the lines, then it's possible to conclude that they were left so heartbroken, in spite of Satkunarasa's detached narration, that they were compelled to put physical distance between themselves and their ex). Yet even in their laid back new routine they remain fundamentally adrift, indulging in the childishly creative but explicitly solitary pastime of creating constellations that exist only to them. They find themselves in a culture where they literally speak a different language to their neighbours, at point that makes them a curiosity to the local children. All the same, they do seem to form an understanding with the children that overcomes this communication barrier - as the protagonist enters old age, the children have grown up into adults and assist them in their daily routine of pushing their boat out to sea, having potentially become a found family to them. Still, the short ends poignantly, with the protagonist worrying that their contribution has amounted to nothing, their ultimate thought as they shuffle off this mortal coil being the terrifying hypothetical that nobody left upon it will even notice their absence. Of note is that the animatic uploaded to Satkunarasa's YouTube channel contains an epilogue, not present in the final film, in which we learn a little more about how life goes on after the protagonist's death - that the local community pay to have their body flown back to their town of birth for burial (a gesture that could be taken as either an act of kindness or definitive rejection), leaving nature to deny them their mark by eroding their name from their tombstone. The finished short feels more impactful for ending where it does, with the onset of oblivion, and the haunting dual implications of the closing statement, "Your heart stops". It suggests both that time has abruptly run out and that the protagonist already anticipates the answer. They've tasted enough of life's indifference to know.

The Most Wonderful Time of The Year (aka Look What Disney Did To Bob)

Watching the Simpsons shorts created for Disney+, it is somewhat mind-boggling to contemplate that there ever was a time when the series doing a self-proclaimed cheap cartoon crossover was treated as a matter of extreme contention, at least among the higher-ups. "A Star Is Burns" of Season 6 was conceived and created with the intention of convincing you to check out The Critic, a series by former Simpsons showrunners Al Jean and Mike Reiss, which had been picked up by Fox for its second season (following a troubled start on ABC) and would be premiering right after. Simpsons creator Matt Groening was so infamously opposed to the move that he insisted on having his name scrubbed from the credits, arguing that The Simpsons and The Critic didn't have anything to do with on another. He was basically right. Writer Ken Keeler had a valiant go at making the set-up as fun and credible as could possibly be expected, but there isn't much dancing around the fact that the episode rests on a massive contrivance - the idea that snobby New York film critic Jay Sherman and the uncultivated small-towners of Springfield would want to hang out together. There's a weird false harmony to their interactions, as if both parties know that ingratiation is their best recourse, even with Bart getting in the occasional aside about how intrinsically crummy the arrangement is. With hindsight, though, the possibility of Jay and the Simpsons sharing a common universe was barely a stretch at all, not when compared with the company the family would be toadying up to in three decades' time. Who would have guessed that in the 2020s we'd be seeing official content that had the Simpsons rubbing shoulders with fairy tale princesses, space tyrants and talking ducks who wear naval jackets (but not pants)? Welcome to the world of Disneyfied Simpsons, a world as baffling as it is brain-rotting.

The obvious rejoinder is that the Disney+ shorts (unlike "A Star Is Burns") are clearly not part of the Simpsons canon and that the crossovers therein represent no radical new world-building for the show's internal universe, but rather pieces of fun, bite-sized content to be readily consumed on the side. More accurately, they're thinly-veiled advertisements for the Disney+ library that hide behind a repurposed, declawed version of the Simpsons' irreverence. They're over before they've even started, they might give you the occasional dumb laugh (so help me, while watching May The 12th Be With You, I actually did chuckle when Mary Poppins - or was it Shary Bobbins? - said, "No fat-shaming on Disney Playground Planet, brat!") and have you go away wanting to binge the latest Marvel series, but they add nothing of value to the Simpsons brand. In my eyes, Plusaversary (2021) would be a strong contender for the nadir of the entire franchise. The part of it that had me absolutely throwing my hands up was at the end when Bart walked in dressed up as Mickey Mouse and Sideshow Mel leaned over and said something along the lines of "I can't believe you're getting away with this!" Excuse me Mel, but what the fuck is there to even be getting away with? Plusaversary is about as subversive as an episode of House of Mouse. Bart did a far more scathing Mickey Mouse impersonation in The Simpsons Movie, and even that was relatively mild compared to how savagely Disney were sent up in the episode "Itchy & Scratchy Land" (if they were able to sneak a gag like "Nazi Supermen Are Our Superiors" into one of these shorts then yeah, that might have impressed me). Before that head-scratching finale, we had Lisa singing a ditty about the virtues of Disney+, in a manner that seemed eerily reminiscent of her role in "The Simpsons Spin-off Showcase" segment "Chief Wiggum, P.I.", only without the winking irony. There were attempts to disguise the tackiness of the occasion with sprinklings of pseudo self-deprecation, including an ever so quaint gag about parents using their televisions as inexpensive babysitters. When Roald Dahl was making that observation in 1964 I'm sure it seemed biting and scandalous, but the conversation about children and screens has moved on significantly, what with the coming of tablets and social media, and I doubt that anyone in 2021 was terribly shocked by the admission that TV is a convenient fallback for keeping the kids pacified.

Defenders of the Disney+ shorts will point out that The Simpsons were never sticklers for artistic integrity, and that they were hawking candy bars before they even had a series proper, but at least those Butterfinger commercials had the decency to restrict themselves to actual advertising blocks and had zero pretensions about what they were. The Disney shorts are cynical slices of self-promotion dressed up as fun little nuggets of bonus content; superficially, they might be capable of acknowledging their own vapidness, but they are not designed to make us question our relationship with the media we consume, as might once have been expected of a creation as iconoclastic as The Simpsons. They have the air of a surrender more than a challenge. I think Frank Oz's comments about Disney's handling of The Muppets applies here: "They're cute...I love cute things like little bunny rabbits, but I don't like pejorative cute."

So yeah, the Disney+ shorts are not my bag and I've tended to avoid talking about them because these days I prefer to direct my efforts toward things that I like or that I at least think are interesting. Besides which, they're so aggressively lightweight that I'm not sure there is a whole lot to be said about them ("Chilli and Bingo were in the same narrative space as Marge and Maggie - isn't that nutty?"). And then last year they did the one thing guaranteed to grab my interest - they dragged Sideshow Bob into this dubious arena - and I thus feel obligated to comment. The Most Wonderful Time of The Year dropped on October 11th 2024, and revolves around Bob joining forces with the Disney villains to belt out an ode to the spooky season by way of a corrupted Christmas standard ("It's The Most Wonderful Time of The Year", originally recorded by Andy Williams in 1963). That they're singing about Halloween but the short has the trappings of a festive special is the big underlying joke. The definition of a Disney villain has been expanded to include the likes of Vader, Thanos and Agatha, but there is a curious dearth of Pixar villains in The Most Wonderful Time of The Year. Curious, because come on, one of them was actually voiced by Kelsey Grammer. Surely if you're going to have Bob interacting with bad guys from other Disney-owned properties, Stinky Pete is the first who should have come to mind? The mint condition prospector's failure to show must be this short's single biggest missed opportunity.

As it is, The Most Wonderful Time of The Year is basically harmless - which, honestly, is about as good as I could have hoped it to be. It's not as feeble and inexplicably self-congratulatory as Plusaversary, but it is every bit as vacuous. I'll start by focussing on what I liked about it, which is that Bob is still a treat to listen to. There's been so much discourse in recent years about the ageing voice cast and what it might mean for the future of series, but Grammer seriously doesn't sound too bad for a man entering his 70s (admittedly, I'm not sure if he's doing Bob's maniacal laugh any more - he apparently found that challenging enough in his 30s). There's a moment in the prelude where Bart (the only Simpson to have any dialogue in this short) indignantly requests that Bob kill him and not torture him with singing, and my immediate reaction was "How dare you? Bob is a wonderful singer!" And yeah, I stand by that. The performance was essentially fun. I also quite liked Bob's description of the Halloween season: "A time when we take a break from the hustle and bustle of daily life to think about what's really important: murder, mayhem, madness and, hey, a few laughs."

Worth noting is that The Most Wonderful Time of The Year is only our second villain-themed Disney+ short. The first was Welcome To The Club from 2022, which was about Lisa meeting the Disney villains, and which actually had the germ of a good idea. Lisa has been invited to become an official Disney Princess, only to discover that she has a greater affinity with the villains. And why not? Disney princesses are, generally speaking, upholders of traditional patriarchal systems and values, whereas villains are the rebels who challenge the status quo. I could see Lisa having some issue with Cruella De Vil, Gaston and the others who were animal killers or exploiters, but the ones who were queer-coded misfits would definitely have a case. It wasn't especially well-realised (Lisa's big hesitation about joining the villains is that they always die at the end, which historically has happened more rarely than people tend to assume), but the potential was definitely there for a short that integrated the characters in a meaningful way, and wasn't just a crossover for the sake of a crossover. Bob's reason for hanging out with the Disney rogues gallery is a lot more surface-level -  the gist of it is that he's a villain, they're villains, so let's all have a big song and dance where we celebrate being evil for the sake of evil. Needless to say, this is as surface-level as Bob's characterisation gets, in line with the flattening he underwent post-1990s. He is just here for the murder, mayhem and madness, and not because he too was once a queer-coded misfit who challenged the power structures of his own environs. The greatest contrivance of the set-up occurs at the opening, when he invites us to, "Pull up a chair, relax and let me extend you on behalf of Disney+ the most wonderful wishes of the season". You know, I don't for a second believe that Bob watches Disney+. He's a PBS guy and you know it. (Actually, as per "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming", he's not much of a chattering cyclops guy at all, but I'm sure he'd see Disney+ as particularly representative of dumbing down cultural standards.)

Unlike Welcome To The Club, there's not any real comprehensive narrative here. It's a straight-up music video, more or less. Bob is holding the Simpson family captive in their own living room in the opening sequence, but this doesn't go anywhere once the song itself gets underway (also, the house is on fire, a detail to which everybody inside seems strangely indifferent, and we later see Snowball II running from the blaze, but that's it). Bob doesn't have any overarching nefarious scheme going on, we don't see the Simpsons escaping from his clutches, and although Bart later shows up with Loki to oppose Bob, hitting him with a rake (ugh, fuck those things) is as far as it goes. Bart is also dressed up as Alex from A Clockwork Orange, a callback to the costume he'd donned in the wraparound narrative of "Treehouse of Horror III". It's an interesting choice, given that Disney doesn't own that film (no, that's Warner Bros' property to bastardise in their own stupid crossovers, as we saw with Space Jam: A New Legacy), but I think it's supposed to code him as being in something of a miscreant mode himself. And wouldn't you know it, by then end of the song he and Bob are on the very same page, singing side by side like they're the best of buds, conceding to the possibly that they are not so diametrically opposed after all, but rather different shades of the same deviant spirit. For Halloween is absolutely the time be unleashing your inner deviant, if not quite as literally as this song suggests. And yes, we could absolutely question the appropriateness of Bart dressing up as that character, which I think was supposed to be an implicit joke in "Treehouse of Horror III". Here, I don't know if Disney fully thought the implications through, seeing as how one of the stills during the closing credits shows Alex-Bart tormenting a gagged and bound Bob. Where exactly is our train of thought supposed to be going?

Futuristic rapists aside, The Most Wonderful Time of The Year is an overwhelmingly safe short, and that's absolutely to its detriment. It doesn't do anything really radical or unexpected with the concept of the Simpsons and Disney worlds colliding for a Halloween bash. There was precisely moment that genuinely caught me off guard, and that was when Amos Slade, the villain from The Fox and The Hound, was singing about the joys of shooting deer while directing his gun at Bambi and his mother, only for the Great Prince of the Forest to sneak up from behind and wallop him.

I'll admit that this sequence hit me, in part because my brain had a slightly hard time processing its very existence. We have Bambi, star of my favourite Disney movie, Bob, my favourite fictional character period, and Slade...well, I'm not really a massive stan of Slade per se (there are some who champion him as one Disney's most complicated villains; he certainly is one of the pettiest) but The Fox and The Hound was one of the quintessential movies of my childhood, and it blows my mind seeing them all onscreen together like this. When I was watching all three properties as a kid in the mid-90s, I would never in a million years have imagined that I'd be seeing them intersect in this way. It's precisely this kind of insidious buzz that these shorts are looking to coast on, and it has little to offer beyond cheap novelty. But it's also the one portion of the short that kinda sorta disturbed me on any level. Not because the action itself is especially edgy; it's not like Slade succeeds in even spooking the deer, after all (without Chief or Copper, I've a feeling he'd be a pretty incompetent hunter). No, what I find unsettling about it is the way Bob pops up wearing a bib with Bambi's face on and cries out, "Yummy!" Oh Bob. The death of Bambi's mother represents the ruptured innocence of umpteen generations of children; why are you cheering this on? Although let's face it, while Bob is absolutely not a Disney+ subscriber, and I'm also not convinced that he's as big a Halloween enthusiast as this short implies...he probably does eat venison. And it tears me up inside. 

Slade is, incidentally, the most "obscure" Disney villain to appear in the short, in that he isn't one you tend to see featured on merchandise (ie: not one of the sexy villains). For the Disney buffs, I don't think The Fox and The Hound could be considered an obscure title at all, but I suspect that your casual Disney+ viewer has no clue who he is and assumes that he's meant to be the actual hunter who killed Bambi's mother. The most obscure characters to appear overall would probably be Hansel and Gretel from the 1932 Silly Symphony short Babes In The Woods, who are brought out alongside Snow White, Aurora and Rapunzel for a joke about how a number of Disney's stars would be obliterated from existence (to the approval of Thanos) if the Brothers Grimm were somehow capable of getting their stories copyrighted. Meanwhile, a character who seems to be doing a more silent disappearing act is Dr Facillier from The Princess and The Frog. He's AWOL from Bob's celebration, despite being one of Disney's most popular 21st century villains, and the short unwittingly draws attention to his absence by incorporating a scene where the Sultan from Aladdin is transformed into a frog by Jafar, a bit that feels like it would be better suited for Facillier (sure, Jafar's got personal baggage with the Sultan, but turning humans into frogs is specifically Facillier's thing). 2024 really wasn't Facillier's year, since he was also conspicuously absent from the "Tiana's Bayou Adventure" attraction that opened in Disney's US parks upon the bones of Splash Mountain. There's been speculation that Disney is becoming increasingly hesitant to use him, for concerns that his voodoo associations could be deemed problematic, and I guess his absence here will be adding further fuel to that theory.

For the most part, the choices of characters are the predictable ones, and that's really too bad. If we must be downing these nutritionally-empty remember berry smoothies, then I say go whole hog with it. Slade was a good start, but there are far bigger swings to be taken still. For instance, why wasn't my man Frollo invited for the occasion? He's a gnarly old soul. Goob and Doris are also fun if you give them a chance. Disney has allowed the Who Framed Roger Rabbit property to stagnate for decades (despite it being the gold standard for cartoon crossovers, in that it was made with palpable love and skill), but Judge Doom and Toon Patrol are terrific villains who are absolutely crying out for more recognition. Be creative. Have Magnifico from Wish show up and all of the other villains be embarrassed to be seen with him, including Edgar from The Aristocats. Heck, why not get Harry and Marv involved, since Disney has Home Alone too? Those guys would absolutely sympathise with Bob, in knowing the sting of being repeatedly bested by a wily prepubescent. Or are there additional legal complications in using Pesci and Stern's likeness?

It also has to be said that the Simpsons visual style really doesn't become a lot of the Disney characters that are featured. In particular, I don't get why Scar, who has one of the most badass designs in all of Disney villaindom, always looks so unbelievably hideous in these shorts. I did wonder if it might be a nod to the show's tendency to draw cats in the most grotesque possible fashion (Groening has stated on multiple DVD commentaries that he thinks Snowball II might be the ugliest feline in animation history, of which he's very proud), only Shere Khan looks halfway decent by comparison, so that's probably not our answer. Elsewhere, the Tangled characters clearly didn't get the memo that The Simpsons is an iris-free zone, and egad does Mother Gothel look like she's on substances.

And what of The Simpsons' own antagonistic arsenal? Do they get much of a look-in with so many Disney foes running rampant? Besides Bob, Nelson is the only one to contribute anything to the song, but a lot of them do make appearances, notably during a crowd shot that packs in a fair number of knaves from across the series. The selection of characters is certainly interesting. Most of the expected faces are there - Mr Burns, Fat Tony, Snake, Herman, Russ Cargill, Hank Scorpio and the like. It's also heartening to see Ms Botz and Lyle Lanley, two one-off villains who presumably won't be back because their voice actors are sadly no longer with us, but that doesn't mean they can't be remembered and celebrated. Other choices are more questionable. Groundskeeper Willie? Er, in that one Halloween segment, sure. I'll concede that he also tried to bludgeon Bart in "Girly Edition". But outside of that, could you really call him a villain? Helen Lovejoy? I've always thought she had a ton of untapped potential as a rival to Marge, but I'm not sure if she ever went far enough with that energy to be lumped in with the rest of these ne'er do wells. Agnes Skinner? Look, much like Helen she's not a very nice person, but if that were the criteria, most of Springfield would be up here. Meanwhile, I was surprised by the absence of Kodos and Kang, given that this is a Halloween-themed short and all, but the space squids do feature later on, having some kind of strangling tussle with Ursula (or are they merely exchanging long protein strings?). The total lack of Cecil Terwilliger feels like the short's second biggest missed opportunity, but then I could imagine a man of his refinement, even one with faded dreams of being a TV clown's sidekick, turning up his nose at the idea of participating in anything so corny. ("Something like this was inevitable, Bob. It's the final step in your descent from legitimate maniac to dancing bear!")

The short ends in a predictable manner, with Bob getting hit by another rake and calling it a "tired gag". True, and pointing it out doesn't make it less so. Although the final still in the closing credits shows Bob riding off into the night on a rake a la a broomstick, implying that the hardest of feelings have truly been put aside in the spirit of the Halloween season. And that's just beautiful. God bless Us, Every One!

Skinamarink (aka Can We Sleep Downstairs Tonight?)

The thing that hurt me the most about Kyle Edward Ball's Skinamarink (2022) was how young its central characters were. Going in, this was something I was totally unprepared for. I'd known that the experimental Canadian horror was about two children who wake up in the dark of the night to find that their father has mysteriously absconded, as have all the windows and doors of their increasingly disorientating abode, but I'd had it it in mind that the nippers in question would be at least 10 or 11. Young enough that the sudden parental abandonment would horrify, but old enough that they wouldn't feel completely defenceless. But no, they're 4 and 6. Painfully callow beings to be caught up in so freakishly nightmarish a scenario. The imperilled pair, Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) and her smaller brother Kevin (Lucas Paul), have relatively little to say about their predicament, with most of their dialogue coming in hushed whispers so scarcely intelligible that subtitles are deployed throughout - but whenever they do open their mouths, the emotive impact is considerable. Every last peep out of them, every plaintive, half-hopeful plea of "Dad?" had me squirming, heightening my awareness of what tiny, terrified little tots these were. If children in jeopardy are a major sticking point for you, in particular children who've neither the vocabulary or the mental capacity to articulate the level of jeopardy they're in, then Skinamarink might not be your picture. 

Actually, the very first thing that had come to mind upon reading the synopsis for Skinamarink was the 1991 track "No Idea" by Earth Leakage Trip, an evocation that continued to niggle all throughout my viewing. Prominently sampled in "No Idea" is the 1975 children's record Happy Monsters, which tells the story of another pair of alliteratively-named children, Bobby and Betty, who seem to have crossed over into a parallel universe where the most mundane of architectural details become indicators of something profoundly askew. In their case, the doors and windows have not disappeared altogether, but are rearranged and out of place; on "No Idea", Bobby's observation that, "The doors are where the windows should be...and the windows are where the doors should be..." is looped and slowed to make him sound high as a kite (the track belonged to the "toytown techno" movement of the early 1990s, which proposed that childhood fantasy and rave drug culture were gateways to a common euphoria). Punctuating Bobby's stupefaction are the startled cries of Heather O'Rourke, as lifted from the 1982 film Poltergeist, interjecting that she cannot see where her mother has gone. The children are alone in a world in which the order has mysteriously shifted, and there is at once something tremendously terrifying and exhilarating in that prospect of slipping past the boundaries of parental control and into the dark unknown (the young ravers of 1991 certainly knew it). Ball's picture is grounded by a similar fascination, with the parents gone, the darkness looming and the familiar gradually giving way to the uncanny. Like "No Idea", it offers a beguiling journey into childhood nostalgia, but one that feels troubled and distorted, so as to emphasise the more sinister implications that were potentially omnipresent all along. The film's title is derived from a popular pre-school nonsense song, and the material comforts of juvenility are all around - the television glow and the cartoon entertainments therein are our guiding light, and the carpet is adorned with a variety of Fisher-Price toys - but these too become a part of the disturbance as the experience goes on, and the world is turned (literally, by the film's end) upside down. Ball also offers a fiendish inversion upon the expected conclusion of any nostalgic voyage, that you can never go home again, by stranding us in a predicament that is its exact opposite - apparently we could go home again, only for the home itself to turn against us and threaten to keep us from finding our way back to the present.

Skinamarink is not for everyone. It requires a lot of patience and, honestly, a love of the mundane. You have to love staring at the shadows on the walls and into the ill-lit spaces in which something might be stirring but relatively little ever reveals itself. You have to be willing to settle for atmospheric clout over narrative clarity. You must have a fascination for low-fidelity, and for the various specks and glitches that characterise "analog horror", the predominantly online media movement from which Skinamarink originates (Ball cut his film-making teeth with the YouTube channel "Bitesized Nightmares", creating shorts based on real dreams as recounted by internet commenters). If you have a particular weakness for hauntology, logophobia or VHS distortion (all those things that I lap up), then odds are that you'll be in your element. 

Despite its aggressively niche form, Skinamarink evokes what must be a near-universal childhood experience - waking up in the early hours to find that your house in the darkness becomes a very different place. It might not have literally turned upside down, but its entire character has been reversed, so that it's no longer a venue of safety, but a harbourer the unknown. Myself, I can recall a stretch from my childhood when my parents had a radio alarm clock with the most ungodly tone, which never seemed to rouse them but would never fail to get to me from the other end of the hallway. It got to the point where I had started to wake up well in advance of the alarm, and would lie awake in petrified anticipation of its imminent eruption. Everything about the scenario - the darkness, the stillness, the deceptive silence - was unbearable. I could not make out the clock on my own wall, nor did I particularly want to stare out into the void that engulfed my bedroom in the nocturnal hours, so I couldn't tell exactly how close we were to the tone's cacophonic assault. I simply knew that it was coming. And when it came, it was a choice between huddling under the duvet for however long it took for my parents to wake up and hit the snooze button (in which case it would strike again in 10 minutes) or braving a trip down that pitch black hallway to turn it off myself. Nine times out of ten, I was more afraid of the pitch blackness and whatever it might be concealing than I was the tone itself, so I lay there and endured it. Eventually, my parents changed the setting, so that the radio went off instead of the tone, and my sleep pattern improved dramatically.

Skinamarink could hardly be described as a found footage film, though it presents itself through the grain and crackle of a degraded tape, giving the impression that we are looking into some long-forgotten memory that could well be our own, and in which it becomes difficult to distinguish between what might be genuine movements in the shadows and what are mere blemishes on the image. The distortion is, we suppose, intended to represent the fuzziness and spottiness of memory, suggesting that Skinamarink might be interpreted as a document of irrational childhood fear and of a young mind's attempts to grapple with the incomprehensible. All the same, that the camera's perspective switches between that of Kevin and Kaylee and, more often still, does not show the perspective of either, makes it challenging to align the film's content with the subjective experience of any one character. For the most part, the camera takes a detached view, showing the corners of the house from various angles but rarely focussing on its subjects. Notably, we almost never get a clear view of any of the participants' faces (the single exception to this rule provides the film with one of its most unsettling images). What's seen of the children is mostly their feet, from the perspective of something that might be scrutinising them the carpet level, while chunks of their hushed dialogue feel overheard, by something that is not quite among them. At the same time, it was seldom my impression that we were seeing the action from the eye-view of the entity skulking around them, a la Steven Soderbergh's Presence (2024) - rather, it felt like a stylistic choice, to emphasise the vastness and the emptiness of the house, and the relative smallness and isolation of the children.

There is a certain timelessness to Skinamarink, in that it seems to exist out of time. An opening title card informs us that the events in question take place in 1995, and the protagonists accordingly use a VHS tape for their early-hours diversion, but the cartoons they watch are all from the 1930s, themselves artefacts of a bygone age that would have seemed alien in the film's own purported setting. Specifically, the cartoons are all from the public domain, which from a practical standpoint spared Ball from having to deal with copyright, but it also serves as another important aesthetic choice, imbuing the film's ambience with a surreal, otherworldly quality that feels evocative of a dream or an alternate reality. The television becomes a further space in which the familiar intersects with the unfamiliar - one cartoon, Chuck Jones' Prest-O Chang-O (1939), features an uncanny leporine character who is in actuality a primitive Bugs Bunny. The cartoons themselves do not feel arbitrary; a popular interpretation has it that they are windows into the nature of the children's predicament, and the unknown they are up against. It has been noted, for example, that one cartoon, The Cobweb Hotel (1936), is about a predatory being (a ghoulish spider) trapping unsuspecting prey (flies) under the thinly-veiled guise of hospitality. Another, Somewhere In Dreamland (1936), includes the sung refrain, "Somewhere in Dreamland tonight",  which could be taken as either an ironic dig at the film's insomnious aura, and at the inability to find escapism in dreaming, or an indication that the children have entered into a state of unreality - perhaps the sleeping and waking worlds have become blurred (there is a reference to Kevin sleepwalking at the start of the film). Then there's Bimbo's Initiation (1931), which shows the title character futilely attempting to escape a surreal house through an endless succession of doors. Of greatest interest to myself, however, was the Fleischer Studios short The Song of The Birds (1935), which is featured in two chunks, the first of which comes shortly after Kaylee asks a question that drastically challenges our understanding of the family's domestic situation: "Why is Mom crying?" So far as we can tell, the children's mother had already vacated the house before the father's mysterious disappearance; the children do not call out for her when discovering that they have been left alone. A little later, Kevin asks if their dad might have gone to the same place as their mom, and Kaylee insists that she no longer wants to talk about her mother. The initial mention of Mom takes us into The Song of The Birds, in which darkness is equated with mourning, as the animated birds prepare to bury one of their fallen, a juvenile bird shot by a boy's pellet gun. It is hard to shake the impression that the mother may be deceased, even with Kaylee's question appearing to place her within the present, and in the immediate vicinity. It could be that they are haunted by her memory, with the endless night representing their unprocessed trauma and grief. Still, what makes the inclusion of The Song of The Birds particularly intriguing is that we do actually see the short's redemptive ending (this is in contrast to say, The Cobweb Hotel, in which we are not shown the scenes in which the flies rise up against the spider). For the grieving birds, dawn eventually comes. The wounded bird is revived, and they make peace with their remorseful tormentor, who discards his gun and dispenses birdseed. Of course, this is glimpsed through distorted VHS flicker, in which the triumph of the birds is unmistakable, but the radiance of the new morn comes in a washed-out reddish hue, and the final image where the boy winks reassuringly at the camera is rendered too bright to see. 

The mother is clearly a touchy subject for the children, and Kaylee's discomfort at discussing her whereabouts is indicative of some lingering family discomfort. There are multiple sections of Skinamarink that seem highly suggestive of a subtext of domestic abuse, although how the mother fits in with this is not obvious - was she a victim, a perpetrator or both? The various theories put forth by viewers range from the mother walking out on the family, having a history of self-harm and potentially taking her own life, or being abused and ultimately murdered by the father. We are perhaps primed to distrust the father from the start of the film, when he is heard discussing an injury sustained by Kevin which he attributes to his falling down the stairs while sleepwalking (it is, though, unclear to whom the father would be speaking at this time of night, if not the mother). During the initial clip from The Song of The Birds, the children are disturbed by a loud banging sound, redolent of some violent altercation occurring elsewhere in the house, and turn to find that a chair has uprooted and positioned on the ceiling; the process of domestic upheaval is truly underway. The mother should not be there, and yet she continues to haunt the household, whether as a literal apparition or as a symbol of that unexpressed trauma. In one of the film's most infamous scenes Kaylee is summoned to the upstairs bedroom to find that her father has apparently returned, and sitting at the opposite end of the bed is her mother, with her back to Kaylee. In another scene we see a more intimate shot of a long-haired woman from behind, presumably the mother. Toward the end of the film a similar female figure is seen from the distance, appearing to dissolve away into the grainy backdrop. If we see the clips from The Song of The Birds as being somehow representative of the children's relationship with their ghostly mother, then we might consider the possibility that the mother is the one in mourning - that she is crying, as Kaylee puts it, for the plight of her children, much as the parent birds in the cartoon are weeping for their unresponsive young offspring, who is seemingly fated to be buried in darkness.

It is, we suspect, a darkness of the parents' own making. Some viewers have interpreted the scene where Kaylee encounters her mother and father in the bedroom, positioned with their backs to one another (although never visible at the same time), as an indicator of divorce - the mother's assurance that she and the father love Kaylee very much seems evocative of something a parent might be expected say in such a position - and the broader picture as an allegory for the emotional turmoil faced by children having to deal with such a significant reordering of their domestic arrangement. Divorce, however, seems too tame and ordinary a predicament to account for the genuine peril these children have to contend with. The mother's subsequent instruction to Kaylee to close her eyes suggest that something more sinister is unfolding. Kaylee complies (for this scene, the camera reflects her point of view, so the audience too is plunged into momentary darkness) and opens her eyes to find her mother gone, although she continues to talk to Kaylee, warning her that "there's someone here", before the sounds of crunching are heard. Is the mother undergoing some sort of terrifying transformation (suggesting that she is becoming the abuser), or is something else crunching her (suggesting that she is a victim of domestic abuse)? Soon after the bedroom encounter, Kaylee is removed from the equation; Kevin locates her in the basement with her eyes and mouth blanked out on her face, and is thereafter left on his own (until now, the children have drawn comfort and solidarity from one another, so their separation comes as a particularly grim turn of events). A strange disembodied voice starts to talk to Kevin from the darkness and admits to taking away Kaylee's mouth as a punishment. Curiously, it says nothing about her eyes, but we might implicitly link their removal to the mother's prior instruction that she keep them closed. We might see a similar connection when, in the film's most distressing development, the voice challenges Kevin to play a "game" that involves inserting a knife into his eye (he complies, and his inevitable reaction recalls that at the start of the film when he suffers his head injury). The entity prefers the children not to see, much as the mother prefers them not to see. There is a running theme of the children being required to look away, and to shut out whatever traumas are going on around them. In another scene, the voice commands Kevin to "sleep", followed by a thud in which he seemingly passes out on the floor.

The entity, a manifestation of what is unspeakable, has seemingly arrived to fill the void left by the parents. It is the new authority to which they must answer, claiming to have punished Kaylee because she persisted in asking for her mother and father. Yet there is a definite paradox in the character of the entity; it dispenses discipline when the children won't do as they are told, and its malevolent insistence on eliminating their vision echoes the more covertly sinister actions of the parents. But in various other respects it has the personality of a child. As Kevin sits on the floor fiddling with his Lego blocks, it repeatedly tells him that it wants to play (said with all the benignity of John Kramer), raising the possibility that its rearranging of the house amounts to some form of erratic play-pretence with what, from its perspective, are all just pieces of Lego at its disposal. The entity is a creative being that delights in subverting the established order, affixing chairs to the ceiling and toys to the wall. With its love of cartoons, and of taking disobedient children's mouths away, it also feels uncannily reminiscent of the omnipotent Anthony in the "It's A Good Life" segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie (a remake of the classic episode from 1961), who punished one of his sisters for insubordination by removing her mouth and another by banishing her into the cartoon world (notably, Bimbo's Initiation is featured in both films). On that note, it also seems significant that both the victim and aggressor of The Song of The Birds are children; unlike the spider from The Cobweb Hotel, the pellet-firing boy seems less malevolent than he does misguided. He shoots at the birds because he sees it as a game; only the prospect of having mortally wounded the young bird manages to convince him otherwise. Alas, Kevin's injury does not bring out the same compassion in the entity, despite its assurances that it will protect him. Is it offer of protection another of its tricks, or does it reflect the parents' childish delusion that what the children cannot see and are prevented from acknowledging cannot hurt them

In The Song of The Birds, it is seemingly an act of divine intervention that saves the injured bird, when rain falls out of the sky and revives it. It is, nonetheless, the compassion of the boy that facilitates this - unable to shut out the birds' suffering any longer, he gets down on his knees and prays, calling on the assistance of a higher power. The happy outcome at the end of the cartoon was thus dependent on the mercy of the omnipotent, but also the final refusal of the boy to turn a blind eye to the trauma happening outside of his window and his resolve to address it. His willingness to throw the gun he had wielded so childishly aside and to become a caregiver to the birds, nourishing them with birdseed, suggests that he has undergone a growth and maturation that is ultimately redemptive. Such an outcome is unattainable in Skinamarink, where the omnipotent have no mercy, those who refuse to turn a blind eye are literally blinded, and growth and maturation is cruelly denied the children within. Shortly after his eye injury, Kevin discovers the will to try phoning the emergency services, and his resolve does appear to momentarily conquer the obstacles - despite the phone lines being down earlier, he is able to get through to an operator this time. The operator praises him for being a brave boy, suggesting that he is undergoing a redemptive growth of his own, only for the entity to ultimately thwart him by transforming the telephone into a toy one, specifically a Chatter Telephone, an anthropomorphised rotary phone manufactured by Fisher-Price. The message is clear - Kevin cannot be allowed to grow up and will stay imprisoned in helplessness of youth. The Chatter Telephone is another detail that seems to defy any clear sense of time, for it has remained a popular childhood icon since its creation in 1961. Even if you never had one growing up, odds are that you are familiar with the toy from its appearance in Toy Story 3 (2010).

What amuses me about the Chatter Telephone's appearance in Skinamarink is how deftly it plays into what was everyone's first instinct on seeing the trailer for Toy Story 3 - that something with a face that uncanny was not to be trusted. I distinctly remember the build-up to the Pixar sequel and what a common assumption it was that Chatter Telephone would be one of the villains. In part because his line, "You and your friends ain't ever getting out of here", was taken out of context in the marketing and sounded like an unambiguous threat, but moreover because his appearance just didn't seem that friendly. What a surprise it was when the film arrived and it turned out we'd all misjudged the little ringer on wheels. His method of communicating (exclusively through his receiver without moving his lips) while inspired, gave off a somewhat sinister vibe, but he was 100% on the level and gave Woody some helpful pointers on evading Lotso's clutches. In Skinamarink the toy (another manifestation of the entity) serves a very different purpose - not only does it signify Kevin's entrapment in this permanent childhood nightmare, it later plays a fiendish trick on him, when Kevin sees the eyes of the phone in the darkness, accompanied by the sounds of snarling, and shines his flash light on it. The monster he'd imagined skulking in the shadows is revealed to be a run of the mill toy...which subsequently reveals itself to be more terrifying in the light than in the darkness. Its eyes shift, its mouth contorts, and it emits a piercing noise about as comforting as that alarm clock tone I described earlier. Kevin apparently decides it was more palatable as a pair of predatory eyes in the shadows, and takes the flash light off of it.

(Spoilers follow) 

The Toy Story connection feels more pertinent than perhaps first meets the eye, for the fate that awaits Kevin seems hauntingly reminiscent of the problem facing Woody and co, destined never to grow old and to stay mired within the realm of childhood as their owners inevitably move on and abandon them. Kevin is reduced to the status of a toy. In the film's third act, he is summoned upstairs by the voice and, in a manoeuvre that would certainly appeal to the denizens of the strange parallel world from Happy Monsters, the floor is now where the ceiling should be and the ceiling is where the floor should be. Kevin is prompted to keep moving through his inverted environs, until we come across a mountain of toys, mostly the Lego blocks he was playing with earlier, suspended on the ceiling. Onscreen text would appear to indicate that 572 days have now passed, a punchline recycled from Ball's 2020 short Heck (the evolutionary ancestor of Skinamarink), which reveals that its protagonist has been stranded in a similar inertia for "18694 sleeps" (in his case, that's more than 51 years, dependent on what length of time a "sleep" is meant to imply). Does this mean that it has been 572 days since the darkness first descended on the children, or is that specifically how long Kevin has been stuck there on the ceiling with the other pieces of misplaced Lego? Either way, how many days' worth of time had already elapsed before Kaylee was taken out of the picture? Have the children aged at all within that time? Is it safe assume that we've arrived in 1997 by now, or has it been that same night in 1995 for all eternity? Kevin's entrapment in that endless corridor, which seems to stretch out into infinity (and beyond) implies that he is suspended in some kind of limbo; he has been tidied away with the other toys, with the entity having seemingly grown bored with him as a plaything. Stifled and helpless, he has no means of progressing, no way of conquering the childhood demons that have become the be-all and end-all of his entire universe. This is the epitome of his abandonment, with the upturned dollhouse in the toy collection echoing the house's disruption and suggesting that the process of domestic upheaval that was triggered by the family's unspoken turmoil is now complete.

Soon after, we are presented with a sequence that is (for my money) all the more disturbing, centring on the framed still photographs that adorn the walls of the house, all of which are of children. They might pass for perfectly ordinary family photos, but for the fact that the children's facial features have been obscured, recalling the subjugation of Kaylee, and in some cases their heads are missing altogether. A natural assumption would be that the images depict Kaylee and Kevin at even earlier points in their short lives; their modification could be indicative of a temporal disconnection, as Kevin's memory of his former life erodes and he is fractured off into an inertia that exists without past or future. Alternatively, it might be suggestive of the historic traumas that have assured the destruction of Kaylee and Kevin across a longer period of time. A more terrifying possibility still is that the pictured children are not Kaylee and Kevin at all, but other victims of this same process, indicating that the story we've seen is in no way unique. Another way of putting it is that this house is, in an allegorical sense, made out of gingerbread, and these children were already eaten by the witch that lurks within - for, in Ball's own words, "If people pay attention, they see it's basically a Hansel and Gretel story."

 

In the most familiar version of the classic German tale, Hansel and Gretel fall into the clutches of a witch after being abandoned in the wilderness by their father, though he does so reluctantly, at the insistence of the children's vicious stepmother. The children ultimately defeat the witch and return to their father to find that the stepmother has been conveniently disposed of in their absence; the vanquishing of the witch implicitly precipitates that of the stepmother, suggesting that, for all intents and purposes, the two are one and the same. If we are to read Skinamarink as a retelling of this story, we might take that as a clue that the children's mother is dead before the picture begins and, furthermore, that the "mother" Kaylee encounters in the bedroom is not really her lingering spectre, but an imposter, in likelihood another of the entity's deceptions. We would, however, do well to keep in mind that in the earliest editions of the story presented by the Brothers Grimm, it was the children's biological mother who expelled them from the home. This was later superseded by the narrative of the wicked stepmother, which proved more enduring - for it is easier to attribute corruption and abandonment to an interloping evil than to reckon with the possibility of it arising from within, among those we'd trust to love and protect us. The narrative is a smokescreen, much like the mother's insistence that Kaylee keep her eyes closed, designed to shield us from some unpalatable reality. And how easily does it really sit with us that, even in the most oft-told version of the story, the biological father bends to the will of the stepmother and abandons the children, even if they are reconciled at the end? Is there such a world of difference between a parent who promises protection and leaves his children to die in the woods and a witch who promises gingerbread and lights up a cooking pot?

The prospect of the witch and parents being parallels of one another, if not outright the same, makes the film's closing implication particularly unsettling. In the final sequence, we return to what is presumably Kevin's perspective once more, scanning the grainy blackness until our gaze falls upon the outline of a figure standing above us. The figure looks vaguely human, and like an adult, but it is hard to tell, not least because its facial features are (of course) obscured. We can just about discern its lips moving, and the words that come out are the predictable ones - we are told to go to sleep. The film thus leaves us at a point of delicious ambiguity; it is unclear if it signals the end of the nightmare, with Kevin (and by extension, ourselves) awakening from a bad dream to the parental reassurance that nothing wrong is really happening (as hollow as such reassurances might sound), or our continued entrapment, as our captor subdues us to a bad reality that is basically inescapable. Exacerbating our unease is that we cannot be certain if we are in the presence of one of Kevin's parents, be it his mother or his father, or the entity. Kevin, for his part, does not seem sure either. He asks the figure to identify itself, and receives no answer. In practice it might make little difference. If we've escaped the witch but have only dubious guardians to run to, aren't we merely headed back to square one?