Door (End of Snivvelyzashuns)

End of world narratives were to be David Anderson's speciality during his time creating experimental animations for Channel 4. Starting with 1986's Dreamless Sleep, his contribution to David Hopkins' Sweet Disaster series, he showed a flair for conveying the disquietude of a hauntingly fragile reality on the brink of unravelling. In the dwindling stages of the decade he teamed up with American author Russell Hoban, and a brace of five minute pieces was formed under the banner of Deadtime Stories For Big Folk. The first of these was Deadsy from 1989, which went on to inspire the "Mark" entry of the "Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives" series of PIFs. The second was Door from 1990, a grisly tale of ill-advised choices that is, for me, as perfect an animated short as they come. The busy, overstuffed and wildly abstract nature of the visuals (created through a combination of stop motion animation and pixelation) keeps us swamped in a nightmarish mix of stimuli, yet it never detracts from the elegant and poetic simplicity of the narrative. The agitated atmosphere gets increasingly sinister as it goes, culminating in the kind of ghoulish punchline that could only work in animation, and which has really stuck with me over the years.

Though overtly apocalyptic, Door does not explicitly link its narrative to the topic of nuclear war, giving it a more mystically parabolic flavour next to its predecessors. Dreamless Sleep had centred on a couple who'd awakened shortly before the detonating of a nuclear weapon, sensing that something in their environment is profoundly amiss but being unable to pinpoint the source until the blinding flash of oblivion was upon them; like When The Wind Blows from the same year, it made a harrowing statement by bringing the all-encompassing matter of nuclear war to the personal level, from the perspective of innocents who were powerless to change their fate. Deadsy took a more comprehensively allegorical approach, relating a humorously macabre monologue about a gender-bending personification of death and nuclear proliferation, and their quest to win over the entire world (their grim spectre also haunts the action in Door, where they put in a cameo appearance). In Door the threat of nuclear annihilation exists on an entirely subtextual level. The central characters, an unnamed man and woman, discover a key marked with a tag, "This Is The Wun". After much deliberation on its meaning, the woman suggests that "This Is The Wun" indicates that this is the key to the one door that should never be opened, lest it unleashes something with the power to warp their reality beyond all recognition. Sadly, their inability to agree on how to manage this most gargantuan of responsibilities reaps devastating consequences. You don't have to reach in far to locate the nuclear allegory, although it can be interpreted quite a bit more broadly than that, evoking as it does the stories of Pandora’s box and the Garden of Eden (for a welcome change, it is here the male figure who makes the fatal move and dooms everyone), suggesting that there may be something innate in the human psyche that compels it toward its own destruction. Compared to Deadsy, where vanity and the lust for domination were the driving forces for cataclysm, the snake in this particular Eden (which isn’t exactly a paradise to begin with, mind) is simple curiosity. The risk is in going so far, in our quest to keep pushing ourselves beyond our limits, that we end up crossing a line from which there can be no going back. Door explores the possibility of how a single and all-too human error might seal not only our own undoing, but cast the whole world into ruin along with us - very pertinent in an age where destroying the world had apparently become as straightforward as pressing a button.

As with Deadsy, Hoban himself takes up narration duties in Door, voicing a couple of characters who remain offscreen until the closing moments, one of whom is relating the cautionary tale of the “wun” key you had better not mess with to the other. Our first hint that these are specifically the voices of a post-apocalyptic landscape comes with their speaking in the slurred, degraded dialect that previously appeared in Hoban’s 1980 novel Riddley Walker (Hoban reasoned that people would hardly be speaking in BBC English following the collapse of civilisation and another dark age), and which I will state upfront that I will not attempt to accurately transcribe here. Connoisseur Video, the people behind the 1992 VHS release David Anderson: Works On Film, were nice enough to include a full transcript of the Deadsy monologue on the inner sleeve, in Hoban’s degraded survivor tongue, but they didn’t bestow that same honor on Door. The dialogue remains close enough to contemporary English that it is still intelligible, so I will be treating it as though it were more or less the same, but for the two key phrases: “This is the wun”, in relation to that very special key, and “the end of snivvelyzashuns we knowit”, the outcome that the characters most fear. We hear the story of the man and the woman (represented by two-dimensional cut out figures), who inhabit a world ("a great big some kind of place") consisting of innumerable doors and have many adventures navigating the surprises they conceal. Even before they discover the key that has the power to dramatically alter their destiny, there is something terrifying and intensely alien about this world, depicted as a sphere covered in a surreal hodgepodge of doors, none of which seem to offer any clear path or exit, only a deepening of chaotic entrapment. It resembles a puzzle box, of the sort that is liable to confound anybody curious or masochistic enough to try engaging with it. At one point a door swings open to reveal a figure positioned within a corridor who is seemingly incapable of doing anything but banging their head interminably against a brick wall, a sign that they've encountered a few dead ends too many. Some of the doors conceal pleasant surprises, which the man and the woman enjoy, while others are direct portals into nightmares ("You opened them, you would just keep falling for a long time"). 

On the making of documentary that appears on the Connoisseur Video release, Anderson shares that he came to the project wanting to explore human relationships and what causes us to self-destruct at an interpersonal level, with Hoban being the one who chose to take that interest in destruction to more cosmic heights. Door actually feels like a perfect amalgamation of their respective fascinations, with the script placing a great deal of emphasis on the interplay between the man and the woman (it's never stated, but we presume that they are a married couple) and their constant bickering, as interminable as anything the maze of doors has to offer. The clue that they are a husband and wife arises from the distinctly humorous nature of their arguing, indicating that they have spent just little too long in one another's company ("Sometimes they would say, why did we ever come here anyhow? Then one of them would say it wasn't my idea, and the other one would say, well it wasn't mine neither, maybe we could go some other place. Only they didn't know any other place."). Their adventures within the world of doors becomes a metaphor for navigating through life within a partnership, with all the highs, lows, surprises and tedium it may bring. As we join them, it isn't exactly trouble in paradise; their relationship doesn't yet feel that it's corrupted, but it has reached a point of stagnation that is wearying, but ultimately survivable. It is the discovery of the wun key that drives an irreparable distance between them, with the woman's cautiousness conflicting with the man's impatience. She suggests that they at least sleep on it before making any decisions, but he is unwilling to do even that and sneaks away with the key, intending to seek out the wun door and uncover the answer by himself. This amounts to an act of infidelity (it isn't a stretch to see the act of inserting a key into a keyhole as a penetrative one), and effectively severs their partnership; his search for the door takes him far away from the woman and they are not reunited. On an allegorical level, their relationship is a reminder that we are all in this wun world together and need to figure out how to make it work; the division over the key indicates the failure of conflicting parties to handle a mutual responsibility that should perhaps never have fallen into the hands of mere mortals to begin with, one that stands between life as we know it and total devastation. Eventually, the man finds a strange rotating door and attempts to get close enough to locate the keyhole - in doing so, the narrator tells us, he ended up getting sucked in by its spinning motion and was dragged into the ground to his demise. A fortunate turn of events, for the woman was right about this being the wun key you had better not mess with, and if the man had gotten any further it would have meant nothing less than "the end of snivvelyzashuns we knowit!"

At this point the narrator's companion speaks up, challenging him on whether he's certain that the man didn't get as far as inserting the key into the keyhole. The narrator responds that he doesn't think that he did. His companion then makes the short's most haunting observation - if the man did commit the reckless deed and bring about the end of snivvelyzashuns, they would not be in a position to even know the difference. The final sequence pulls back to show the sphere of doors, now busted and disintegrating, as the narrator and his companion are revealed to be a couple of disembodied, heavily decayed heads drifting through the debris of the ruined world. The narrator reiterates that he doesn't think the man opened the door. "Wow, what a lucky us," says his companion, and the film fades to black.

 

On the VHS documentary, Anderson clarifies that he saw the epilogue as happening several centuries after the events involving the mysterious key, with the talking skulls representing the subsequent generations who've lived with the consequences ever since. Within context, they can hardly be described as survivors, given their advanced state of decay; rather, they are fragments of the damaged landscape that have been floating in infinity for so long that they've lost sight of what that landscape once was. The bitter irony is that the "snivvelyzashuns" in question already ended long ago, and what they now know is barely civilisation at all. Their continued existence speaks not to the resilience of humankind (if these skulls could even be defined as human), but to the elongation of its decline, their inability to distinguish between the so-called snivvelyzashuns of then and now indicating yet another layer of that protracted decay. The legend of the man and the woman with the wun key might be exactly that - a mere legend, now that the world is far-removed enough from whatever events first set it on its course of irreversible deterioration, but its purpose has been subverted, not to preserve the truth but to reassure listeners that the world was actually saved. It becomes a denial of a reality that should perhaps be all too stark, but which is ultimately too bleak to accept. Door closes, then, by presenting us with a paradox, in the contrast between the man's fatal need to know what lurked behind that wun door and the skulls' desperate need to not know the truth of their hopeless situation. Curiosity might be the factor that propels us to our ruination, but having opened those doors that would have been better off remaining closed, to what extent would we sooner remain ignorant of the consequences? Which proclivity is stronger - our need to know, to understand and keep pushing ourselves into unmapped worlds, or the ability to close our eyes when we're on the cusp of uncovering something truly unpalatable? It is also possible to project a degree of conscious irony onto the second skull's closing statement, as though he wishes that the current state of snivvelyzashuns would be brought to an end.

I honestly don't remember when I first saw Door. I first knowingly came across it in 2012, back when I had started my mission to locate each of the Sweet Disaster series, which led me to check out some of Anderson’s other, less elusive projects, and I found that it had this instant and uncanny sense of familiarity, like the thing had already been haunting me for the better part of my existence. It is possible that I had seen it, or at least an excerpt from it, somewhere before and not quite taken it in (I don’t know if you-know-who would have covered it in his Cartoon Club), but I'd like to think that its freaky ambience just struck a chord with me because it felt so reminiscent of some half-remembered nightmare I'd once had (there is a third option, which is that I’d seen the McEwans lager ad that Anderson later animated using many of the same sets as Door). I do recall becoming utterly obsessed with it then and there in 2012. Not because I was fearing any imminent apocalypse, but because I was, at that point in my life, having a hard time coping with uncertainty in a more generalised sense (in a way that leaves you wide open to intrusive thinking), and I found the ending chilling but also strangely cathartic. I didn’t know if I saw something defiantly reassuring in the concept of being damned and unable to tell the difference, or if that inability represented an entrapment in itself, if you couldn't see beyond it and had no lingering appreciation for what was lost - I just liked that the characters acknowledged that they would have no way of knowing either way. It seemed exonerating, a reminder of how we're all just crumbs of debris floating around in space with only a narrow inkling of the bigger picture (both on a cosmic and on a personal level), and in those circumstances there's not a whole lot we can do other than to learn to trust whatever our own judgement is telling us. What a lucky us indeed.

The Victor (aka I Wondered If That Might Happen...)

The title of Derek Hayes and Phil Austin's 1985 animation The Victor conceals a couple of cunning contradictions. Within context, it is explained in an acronym that is revealed in three separate stages across the narrative, as the action cuts intermittently to a computer screen indicating the successive phases of a sinister experimental procedure - "Violence Induced", "Control Terminated" and finally "Operative Reaction". The last of these phases is followed by a question mark, not present in the title, which plays a vital role in how we are prompted to make sense of the film's macabre developments. The operative reaction is the unknown being tested by the experiment, but the question ultimately raised has to do with who really wins in the end. Is there a victor to be had at all in this scenario? 

Mixed in with the bitter irony is an incongruous dash of loving affection, for the title is also a reference to a British comic from Hayes and Austin's youth, renowned for its "boys' own adventure" type narratives, the art style of which their film was intended to evoke. The Victor is suffused with a warm undercurrent of boyhood nostalgia, which feels paradoxical, given the dystopian forces that prove as prevalent, lingering on the sidelines and pulling the strings from above. 

The protagonist of The Victor is identified, via a montage of computer images shown in the opening sequence, as Jimmy Mullen, a pacifist who resisted conscription into the military and attempted to go AWOL. Now, he finds himself undertaking a mind-bending journey, from the shadows of a seedy bar-room and into a distorted mirror version of the promenade at Brighton, guided by a mysterious rectangular light and bombarded with a flurry of nightmarish stimuli that repeatedly challenge his inclination toward non-violence. When his resistances are shut down, Jimmy discovers that he's capable of unleashing quite a devastating rage upon anybody who threatens him. By the end, it's revealed that Jimmy was the subject of a horrifying military program designed to convert the pacifistic into brutally efficient killing machines, by loading them with doses of violence-inducing drugs. The rectangular light he's been responding to all this while was the window from which his captors were observing as he made his way around the testing field. The adversaries he's been fighting and destroying one by one were none other than his fellow soldiers, including his best friend Vince, who meets a bloody demise when Jimmy momentarily fails to recognise him and hurls a pool ball at his temple.

The Victor was the second film created by Hayes and Austin's company Animation City (the first being the wordless fantasy short Skywhales from 1983). Commissioned by Channel 4 as part of its early commitment to giving the UK animation industry a much-needed shot in the arm, the film took inspiration from a 1970s World In Action documentary about the testing of the drug BZ on US soldiers (in that regard it has thematic parallels with the 1990 Tim Robbins thriller Jacob's Ladder), but also a personal anecdote concerning a friend's recent experiences in combining two lots of prescription drugs, which resulted in hallucinations. The prescribing doctor's response - "I wondered if that might happen...I haven't used those two drugs together before" - became dialogue inserted verbatim into the mouths of one of the characters, revealing as it does authority at its most offhandedly slapdash. At just shy of 15 minutes in length, the project was an ambitious one and faced some budgetary hurdles, but paid off handsomely when the completed film proved popular in the festival circuit and received a theatrical run at the Scala cinema in London, attached to the comic horror feature The Return of The Living Dead. Its Channel 4 debut was highly belated (Clare Kitson, in her 2008 book British Animation: The Channel 4 Factor, speculates that the film was initially withheld on account of its theatrical release, after which it just had trouble securing a suitable timeslot), but finally saw the light of day - or, more accurately, the dimness of night - in 1989, going out at a 23:30 airing when few children were likely to be watching. 

Jimmy's backstory is laid out in the beginning through a series of predominantly still images, offering glimpses into his life pre-conscription and establishing not only his ordinarily peaceful nature (he is seen sporting a shirt with the peace symbol and bearing an anti-war placard) but also that he was a highly sociable being, constantly surrounded by companions. Close scrutiny of these images is required to appreciate that the friends from his past are the same figures who'll be turned against him in his drug-induced nightmares; in the meantime, the synthesising of Jimmy's likeness with computer data foreshadows his impending degradation to the status of a machine. The blurring of fantasy and reality brings an uncanny element of déjà vu to the proceedings, a memory that feels ready-made and ready-distorted, and is as troubling for us to pin down as it is for Jimmy. In the film's strangest running gag, Jimmy is harassed by a figure who seems oddly familiar in more ways than one - he bears a striking resemblance to public schoolboy Billy Bunter, a character created for weekly boys' story paper The Magnet in 1908 (his ability to morph into a mutant bat is a total liberty on Hayes and Austin's part), but if we're attentive we'll see that he's actually a monstrous parody of one of Jimmy's former schoolfriends. In spite of the bleak subject matter, there's a playful, anything-goes quality to the fantasy sequences, in which references to British popular culture are abundant (eagle-eyed viewers will notice that Jimmy walks past the TARDIS on the promenade at Brighton, the Fourth Doctor having paid a then-recent visit to the town in the episode "The Leisure Hive"). These references, along with the funfair amusement-style scenarios navigated by Jimmy (a camp haunted house in which the perils become all-too hairy, a dizzying helter skelter and a dodgems track that transforms into a missile-heavy war zone) are suggestive of innocent diversion gone feverishly wrong. The action sequences, meanwhile, are staged with a boldness that evokes the frenetic escapisms of contemporary arcade games (at multiple points, Jimmy decries the inducement to fight as participating in a stupid game), with the consequences proving painfully real even as the details are illusory. 

The surreal visuals and action set-piece might be the most immediately commanding things about The Victor, although for my money its most impactful moments are to be found in its quieter intervals, which convey a sadder and more subdued sense of how Jimmy's once-earnest world has been corrupted and turned against him. The significance of Brighton to Jimmy is not made totally explicit, but we might notice that the steps on which he stands while surveying the deceptively peaceful promenade are the same ones he was glimpsed upon in one of the opening images, where he was seen palling around with Vince and friends in what was evidently a more carefree juncture in their lives. A balloon bearing the RAF roundel floats silently overhead, a signal of the military surveillance that is already omnipresent, as Jimmy muses on the likelihood that Vince (already brutally dispatched) will be in his usual spot, chatting up the waitresses at the local cafe. This was the ground on which he forged his community. It seems as solid as ever, but is only a few movements away from giving way into a pit of hallucinatory carnage, where his erstwhile allies are recast at best as leering bystanders or, at worst, as direct adversaries. Jimmy is plunged into his nightmare with the expressed warning that he is now on his own; the experiment plays out by not merely heightening his inclination to attack, but by eroding his very concept of connection, prompting him to destroy the people he would, under more auspicious circumstances, have greeted as his own. 

Hayes has shared that he approached the film with an interest in exploring what was the more innate human characteristic, aggression or cooperation. Is Jimmy to be seen as a fundamentally peaceful individual whose nature has been forcibly inverted by external forces, or was his pacifism solidified by his sense of social belonging, something that breaks down the instant he loses that camaraderie and has only his primal urges to fall back on? The obliterated of Jimmy's social identity is cited as a necessary factor in his transformation into an ultra-efficient killer, in the joking observations of one of his captors' lackeys that he couldn't expect to find much affinity with the protestors in CND after unleashing such a violent display. Jimmy's repeated howls of disbelief make it plain that he is having difficulty consolidating these conflicting impulses, much to the perturbation of the army general overseeing the procedure. For as futile as Jimmy's objections might seem while he's fastened to a gurney and barely lucid, they represent a spanner of unpredictability within the works that his captors have been unable to weed out, troubling to the general because it indicates a battle not yet won. But then some victories have the potential to prove unmitigatedly Pyrrhic.

The Victor closes by turning the viewer's own perception of violence back on them, with the startling climactic development where Jimmy breaks free of his restraints and his drug-induced demons become solid and real. It amounts to a thorough rejection of the calmer interlude following the experiment, in which rationality appeared to have taken a hold and we were offered a logical explanation for everything Jimmy had been through. Not only do Jimmy's fantasies spill over inexplicably into the external world, his captors' own reality becomes fluid and unstable, with the gun that fails to protect them from Jimmy transforming into what looks like a clew of little pink worms. The barrier between reality and hallucination has been eviscerated, leaving the world to make its inevitable descent into the realm of full-blown nightmares. Given Jimmy's implied destruction of his captors, it might be tempting to read the final outcome through a redemptive lens, with Jimmy rising up against the oppressive forces that had manipulated him into killing his allies - it does, however, come at the expense of his pacifistic nature, which has by now been completely annihilated, to the extent that he no longer expresses resistance or disbelief over his actions. Jimmy has surrendered to his violent impulses, whether induced or innate, and become the ultimate killing machine, so potent that it cannot be contained, with the black abyss that consumes the screen pointing not to triumphant rebellion, but to the impending oblivion. Jimmy's is a battle lost, and it is through an unseen side effect that he takes out everything else along with him. The victor? This is a game that was always fated to have no winners. Jimmy was right to not want to play. 

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 superficial -  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!