The artist who created “The Triplets of Belleville” is at it again.
Finally — some good news for a change.
Sylvain Chomet, the French animator behind “The Triplets of Belleville,” is back at the ol’ drawing board after 15 years.
“A Magnificent Life,” in U.S. theaters Friday, is an animated biopic concerning Marcel Pagnol, a French playwright, filmmaker and author whose works celebrated the Provence working class, according to The New York Times(gift link).
The film, says Mother Times, showcases Chomet’s fondness for narratives set in the mid-20th century and protagonists who are artists or performers.
Which is all very fine, of course. And we should all dash out to see it at once, if not sooner. But the good good news is that the maestro is hard at work on a spinoff of “Belleville,” based on a story he wrote more than two decades ago, in which the triplets visit their 100-year-old father, who does not know that they spurned traditional employment to become cabaret singers. Says Chomet:
“It has the same feeling as my previous ‘Triplets’ film. It’s completely mad, and it’s quite a baroque movie with brand-new, very cartoony characters.”
Meanwhile, Chomet’s fans will probably not be surprised by his views regarding today’s soulless, cookie-cutter animation. Asked if there were any recent animated films he’s enjoyed, he mentioned Pixar’s “WALL-E” — which was released in 2008.
Still, this year’s “spring forward” meant we spent one less hour today stacking sandbags against the tide of bullshit flowing downstream from the Orange House.
So, winning? Maybe. We must take these little victories wherever we find them.
This morning I burned a little of my saved daylight by reading an essay in The New York Times, in which the daughter of two former American revolutionaries found the Oscar-nominated “One Battle After Another” to be “nothing more than entertainment” rather than “a battle cry for a generation.”
Huh. Hollywood veterano Paul Thomas Anderson cranks out a rapid-fire rom-com inspired by a rambling mythical history by Thomas Pynchon, and Hope Reeves — who herself is working on a comic memoir of being raised by retired Weatherpersons James H. Reeves and Susan Hagedorn — finds it regrettably unserious.
Well. Shit. Can’t have that. Can we?
Why not?
• • •
I myself have been regrettably unserious since — well, since forever — and, like the thought of suicide, it has gotten me successfully through many a bad night. And a few fairly grim days, too, whether shortened or lengthened by government fiat.
My upbringing was unremarkably middle-class — Catholic Republican father, Presbyterian Democrat mother — and yet somehow I came to cast myself in the role of atheist radical son.
A diet rich in Warner Brothers cartoons, Marx Brothers movies and Mad magazine will give a kid a taste for anarchy. Who do you root for? Not The Man, that’s for sure. It was one battle after another and Elmer Fudd lost every one of them.
So while I would eventually become interested in Weatherman, and personally sample various flavors of Marxism — Socialist Workers Party, October League, Communist Party (M-L) — these last two, like Weatherman, offspring of the Students for a Democratic Society — my first real political infatuation was with the Yippies.
• • •
Elmer wanted to cut off my lovely hair and send me to Vietnam. I wanted to Bugs Bunny his ass. And so did the Yippies, whose regrettably serious alias was the Youth International Party.
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were probably the most famous of these Groucho Marxists, whose theater was the street. Levitating the Pentagon. Throwing money at traders at the New York Stock Exchange. Running an actual pig — Pigasus the Immortal — for president.
The Yippies invaded Disneyland, taking over Tom Sawyer’s Island, threw pies, and applied for a permit to blow up the General Motors building. When it was denied, the Yippies shrugged and said it only proved that it was impossible to work within the system to change the system.
Alas, that old system sure proved durable, resisting change from within and without.
Some Yippies became yuppies. Rubin traded his Viet Cong flag shirt for the suit and tie of a businessman. He died in 1994 after being hit by a car while crossing Wilshire Boulevard, in front of his penthouse apartment. He was 56, well past the 30th birthday after which nobody was to be trusted.
Hoffman jumped bail after a dope bust and went underground. He eventually resurfaced, did some light time, and returned to activism.
But it was the Eighties — remember those fabulous Eighties, kids? — and the old act didn’t seem to be going over so well with a new audience. Hoffman died, reportedly by his own hand, in 1989. He was 52.
• • •
By then, mockery had already begun infiltrating (or was being co-opted by) The Establishment. “Saturday Night Live,” which debuted in 1975 with guest host George Carlin, somehow remains relevant in an aw-shucks-just-kiddin’ sort of way. David Letterman, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have had their innings, and Jimmy Kimmel is still in there pitching despite some booing from the luxury box at Fudd Stadium.
But there’s something about old-school, street-level mockery that really gets The Man’s dander up. The reigning Man, Elmer Befuddled, who hires out his shotgunning of critters at home and abroad because bone spurs, watches a shit-ton of TV. And if he sees yuuuuge crowds from coast to coast rocking the next No Kings rallies on March 28, giving him the old Warner Bros.’ sendoff — “Th-th-that’s all, folks!”— he might just do a John Belushi, spin right out of his chair, and hit the deck in a slobbering, shitting sayonara.
It comforts me to think back to one of Gilbert Shelton’s “Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers” cartoons, in which political candidate Rodney Richpigge commits suicide by proxy, ordering his chauffeur to drive off a bridge because he thinks people are laughing at him (a half pint of amyl nitrite getting an unexpected wash in Fat Freddy’s jeans was the actual giggle-trigger).
Hope, as they say, springs eternal. No matter what time it is.
It wasn’t over on Aug. 9, 1974, when Gerald R. Ford trotted out that boogeyman-be-gone bullshit upon assuming the presidency vacated by Richard M. Nixon, a rat fleeing the ship of state he did his best to sink.
And Ford went on to be even more stunningly full of shit when he added:
Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.
A month later, Ford finally achieved escape-velocity, bullshit-wise, when he granted “a full, free and absolute pardon” to his predecessor, a man whom Hunter S. Thompson called “so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.”
Some of us thought that was as bad as it was ever going to get.
Ho, ho, as the Good Doktor would say. We were wrong.
We have elevated some remarkably stupid, ineffectual, and/or venal hombres to the presidency since then. Not Ford, though. Nobody voted him into the gig, but he certainly got voted out in ’76 when the nation decided, well, fuck it, they’d rather have a Georgia peanut farmer in the Oval Office than the knucklehead who waved Tricky Dicky off to San Clemency with nothing but his pension and related benefits to keep him warm in retirement.
And even now, when we appear to have reached our political nadir, the creaky national machinery in the tiny palsied handsies of a senile, shambling, burger-gobbling narcoleptic, a convicted felon with a mean streak a mile wide and an unquenchable thirst for wealth, power, and vengeance, who apparently has a joy buzzer installed in his diapers so an aide can shock him awake, however briefly, to unleash a torrent of non sequiturs to be dutifully chronicled, analyzed, and excreted by the press corpse, well … I’m not about to tell you that this is as bad as it’s ever going to get.
Pogo — himself a candidate for the presidency in 1952 and ’56 — hit the nail on the head back in 1971, when Tricky Dicky was still kneewalking drunk around the White House, arguing with the paintings and looking for an exit that didn’t involve a perp walk in cuffs. Had we insisted upon it, we might have been spared some of what was to come.
But we didn’t. And so it goes.
“We have met the enemy and he is us,” said Pogo. Truer words, etc.
As long as I was enjoying a rain delay, exercise-wise, I decided to see if I still remembered how to draw a cartoon.
I don’t think Gilbert Shelton, Pat Oliphant, or Bill Watterson have anything to worry about. But this doesn’t look too much worse than the stuff I used to get paid for, before the vulture capitalists et up and shat out all the bicycle magazines.
So I guess the ol’ muscle memory hasn’t gone completely senile. Yet.
Another shower of oddball dreams, and after two consecutive dinners of nothing spicier than a mild beef vegetable soup with cornbread, too.
The old MacSkull Air must be defragging its hard drive. Or just fragging it.
Why else would I be dreaming about three things I haven’t been doing lately — cyclocross, burro racing, and cartooning — all in one long dark night of the soul?
Maybe my cranial janitor came back from an extended coffee break to find a new supervisor scowling at him, with arms crossed and one foot a-tapping.
“Have you seen the state of this place? Acid flashbacks piled up here, empty liquor bottles scattered over there, and just look at this fantasy closet! No, on second thought, just nail that fucker shut. Nobody needs to see that shit. One quick peek and I had to book a double session with my shrink. So, deep clean, new carpet and drywall, and fresh paint all around. Chop-chop!”
When I arose and toddled into the kitchen in search of the Ebony Elixir of Life, Herself was fiddling with a Panasonic bread machine that she and her sisters found at some estate sale last fall, and I was onboarded as a consultant before I could decide whether I was actually awake.
A quick glance around took in zero sisters, so after two cups of the black velvety goodness and one fat slice of buttered cornbread I put my two cents’ worth into the project and now we await the results. If you hear of a mushroom cloud over Albuquerque and the Authorities say it smells like bread you’ll know the backstory.
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