The Fly II (1989)

Posted on March 9, 2017 at 2:14 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

If it had been made in the 1950’s, undoubtedly The Fly II (1989) would have been called “Son of the Fly.” Picking up on the only thread left dangling from David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), Veronica Quaife (now played by Geena Davis lookalike Saffron Henderson), still carrying Seth Brundle’s child with his fly-corrupted genes, gives birth in a high security facility within the Bartok Company, the financier of Brundle’s telepod experiments. Echoing the nightmare sequence of the first film, her offspring appears to be slime-covered insect larva, and Veronica dies from the delivery. But the sac splits open and a seemingly ordinary baby boy lies within. The audience has to accept that Veronica would not go through with an abortion, which she’d already attempted in The Fly before Brundle kidnapped her – it’s a suspension of disbelief, given her determination to abort the mutant inside her, and the fact that she witnessed her lover’s horrifying deterioration and loss of humanity. But – horror films must have sequels, and here we are. Though Davis does not return, Jeff Goldblum sort of does – in outtake footage from the original film, viewed as video recordings which his son studies. The boy, Martin Brundle (Eric Stoltz, Mask, Pulp Fiction), at first has no outwardly fly-like mutations, but he is obviously “different.” For one thing, he has a superior intelligence. For another, he grows into Eric Stoltz within the first five years of his life. He is raised within the Bartok facility under surrogate father figure and company founder Anton Bartok (Lee Richardson, Prizzi’s Honor), a greedy, soulless megalomaniac. To keep the restless young genius Martin engaged, he offers him a job in the facility: to work on his father’s old telepods, which can no longer successfully teleport human flesh. Martin has already witnessed the horrifying result of Bartok teleporting his beloved golden retriever. Reviewing his father’s tapes, he tries to find the nuance in the programming, inspired by his romance with another Bartok researcher, Beth Logan (Daphne Zuniga, The Sure Thing, Spaceballs). But his experiments take on more urgency when he realizes that his flesh is beginning to transform and reveal the corruption of Brundlefly’s genes.

Young Martin Brundle, growing at an accelerated rate.

As with The Fly, this sequel comes from Mel Brooks’ Brooksfilms. The first treatment was provided by Video Watchdog‘s Tim Lucas, who had a strong relationship with Cronenberg after chronicling the production of Videodrome and The Fly. His idea, which he recounted on his blog last year, would have been called Flies (a la Aliens), with Davis to return as Veronica, now encountering Brundle’s consciousness as a ghost in the machine within the Bartok Company. Brundle’s mind is being exploited by Bartok to create new innovations. Lucas’s treatment went further, introducing the concept of cloning. Despite an endorsement from Cronenberg, the concept was not accepted by Fox, and it was Mick Garris (The Stand) who tackled the project next. (The final version of the film does contain elements from Lucas, notably that it all takes place within the Bartok Company.) In a 2010 interview with Geekscape, Garris recalled that his script “dealt with concepts of birth and abortion, an evolutionary next step in the ‘special’ child of Veronica Quaife and Seth Brundle. Religious fanaticism played a part, and there was a lot going on. But at the time, Leonard Goldberg was running the studio, and Scott Rudin was our production executive. They had contrasting views of how the movie should be done, and I was right in the middle. They wanted to make a teenage horror movie, which was not how I wanted to go.” So the project was handed over to Jim and Ken Wheat (Pitch Black), with a final pass by Frank Darabont (The Mist, The Shawshank Redemption). Despite all the mutations the story underwent, this is not a bad gene pool from which to draw. With Cronenberg off tackling original projects (he was between Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch), directing duties were handed to the creature effects artist of The Fly, Chris Walas. Walas had also worked on Gremlins, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Return of the Jedi, among others, but The Fly II was his first feature film as director. Apart from an episode of Tales from the Crypt, to date he has only directed one other film, The Vagrant (1992) with Bill Paxton.

Martin (Eric Stoltz) shows Beth (Daphne Zuniga) the telepods.

The main failure of The Fly II is that it is never all that interesting – not like the unfolding morbid fascination in Cronenberg’s original. It is not, however, a bad film – just a disappointingly ordinary one. Darabont’s screenplay, which seems to incorporate elements of all the writers who had worked on the story before him, does make one smart decision, borrowed from The Fly: building up the characters as long as possible with an extended first act. Although Stoltz’s Martin Brundle has limited depth – after all, he’s only been alive for a short amount of time, and his experiences are few – we’re given plenty of opportunity to develop empathy for him, and the romance he develops with Beth is convincingly handled (Zuniga is a strong actress). One wonders if Stoltz was cast because of his ability to act beneath layers of thick makeup (Mask), though eventually he enters a cocoon state and emerges as a giant puppet not unlike the Queen in Aliens. Before that happens, Martin has to contend with a lecherous security guard and the absurdly sinister Bartok, two-dimensional foes that make the film feel cookie-cutter. When Martin escapes from the facility with Beth, they pay a visit to the first film’s Stathis Borans (John Getz, the only returning cast member), although, in what might be a symptom of the screenplay’s tortured development, he doesn’t contribute anything to the plot, but merely states that Martin already knows the answer to his problem. That answer would be taking a human test subject into the telepod with him to absorb the genetic material and purge the fly out of him, something which will likely kill the other person.

Beth Logan (Daphne Zuniga).

If any of this will stick with you at all, it will probably be Martin’s poor golden retriever, which – he discovers halfway through the film – has been kept alive by Bartok even after being mostly reduced to oatmeal by the telepod. I can’t emphasize this enough: the dog puppet is one pathetic-looking creature, its tongue hanging out, covered with sores, crawling miserably toward its bowl of swill. In a tearful moment, Martin puts it out of its misery. Tearful? Maybe hilarious? Am I sick for laughing quite hard at this scene (and I am a dog owner, I should add)? It would help, perhaps, if the dog didn’t look like someone had run over a Muppet. But this does set the stage for one of the best scenes in the film. In the Alien/Aliens inspired climax, security sends their guard dog chasing down the hallways to find the monster. In a typical horror film, that would spell the end of the dog. Credit to Walas and Darabont for instead having Martinfly lean over and pet the animal – a very nice gag. And now that I think about it, maybe the key difference between The Fly II and its predecessor is that this one has a soft spot. The climax provides deliverance for the hero and justice against the villain (amidst some very effective splatter scenes and gooey makeup effects). Cronenberg’s is more cynical, and therefore more haunting. His film stays with you. The Fly II is a sequel, and seems to be under no obligation to linger in the memory after the credits have ended. But there are much worse ways to kill an hour and a half.

 

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The Fly (1986)

Posted on March 8, 2017 at 8:56 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Watching David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) is a momentous event for me. Some background is required. When I was little, my parents enforced a strict “no R-rated movies” policy. But I was keenly interested in monsters. From the library I checked out binders of Famous Monsters of Filmland, and read many books on classic monster movies. Lon Chaneys Sr. and Jr., Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff were all names with which I was familiar from a very young age. Because I had no access to more modern, gorier horror films like Alien, I was educated on the classic Universal horror movies of the 30’s and 40’s, and giant monster movies of the 50’s and 60’s. I was certainly familiar with The Fly (1958) starring David Hedison and Vincent Price, though before I actually saw it, I remember my mother describing it to me. “And then there he is,” she said, “stuck in a spider’s web, a fly with a human face. A spider is about to eat him. And the little fly is saying ‘Help me, help me!'” (Oh – spoilers.) I know she described the scene to me before I saw it because I anticipated that climax on my first viewing. All I remember is waiting for that horrifying moment, which carried such weight because my mother was often imitating the little David Hedison voice, “Help me! Help me!” while wriggling her fingers like little fly legs.

David Cronenberg’s “The Fly.”

When I was about ten years old, my father rented David Cronenberg’s The Fly. After I went to bed he watched it with a family friend, Jinx; my mother declined because she can’t stand horror movies (this, the same woman who chased me about the house squealing “Help me, help me!”). The next evening I was eating my favorite meal, Campbell’s Split Pea Soup, a lovely viscous green. Jinx is delighting in describing to my horrified mother every scene from Cronenberg’s film. Finally she says, “And he just vomits. He vomits and – it looked like that.” She pointed at my soup. Everyone laughed, expecting me to be traumatized. Perhaps this, at last, would turn young Jeff off Campbell’s Split Pea Soup. But, in truth, I was put off only for a moment. To this day, I love Campbell’s Split Pea Soup. Anyway, come high school, come R-rated movies, I still don’t watch Cronenberg’s The Fly. It just never crosses my path. In college, I finally rent the film, but I never get around to watching it, and I have to return it before it’s overdue. A couple weeks ago, I was up at three in the morning trying to get a crying baby to fall asleep. I start watching The Fly on the Sundance Channel. I’m halfway in when I realize that the film is edited, the swearing awkwardly dubbed over, the violence snipped out. (It had been a while since I watched this channel. Since when did they start editing their movies? Why would anyone watch this channel anymore?) I have to stop watching. I’m a purist. But now I’m resolved: I am going to watch this movie. This last weekend, I picked up a used copy of The Fly and The Fly II from the same store. “Ooh,” said the woman behind the counter, and she had to sing the next two words, for some reason: “The Fly“…as though I were about to be initiated into a special cult. Now I am here to report that I have finally watched the damn movie, uncut, all the way through, pea soup vomit and all.

Geena Davis as Veronica Quaife.

The thing about watching it now is that I have context galore. I’m already familiar with not just the Price film and its immediate sequel, Return of the Fly (1959), but also the original story “The Fly” by George Langelaan, and most of Cronenberg’s work – which is probably more important when it comes to watching this particular movie. (I’m embarrassed to admit I had no idea that 1965’s The Curse of the Fly existed until a couple weeks ago, so I’ll have to track that down for completeness’ sake.) The story is almost like an ancient fable to me by now, something Aesop wrote on a bender. A scientist builds two teleporter pods. A fly slips in beside him just before he zaps himself from one pod to the next, and when he emerges from the other end, he’s part-fly. In the original story and the 1958 film, the fly has also become part-him. He lumbers around with a fly’s head and his left arm swapped out for a fly’s leg, and the fly buzzing around the house has his head and arm. But Cronenberg and co-screenwriter Charles Edward Pogue (Psycho III) tweak the concept to avoid the “Help me, help me!” twist ending and plunge into even darker territory. Scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) is genetically spliced with the fly – they are fused together and become one, leaving no little fly with a Goldblum face. At first nothing seems to have gone wrong at all. If anything, he becomes reinvigorated and more physically and sexually athletic than ever before – even acrobatic. But soon enough the fly inside him begins to poke through, which Cronenberg depicts, in his typical body-horror fashion, as a tumorous full-body mutation and a grotesque evolution.

Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) begins to transform.

It’s often about evolution with Cronenberg: homo sapiens moving to the next, unexpected branch on the tree, which can seem frightening and repulsive because it’s unfamiliar and new. Sometimes that next stage is envisioned as a merging with technology (see: Videodrome, eXistenZ; even the J.G. Ballard adaptation Crash plays with the theme), and that pops up in The Fly in a few different ways. Brundle is using the telepods to deconstruct and reassemble matter, but at first is limited to inanimate objects, struggling to teach the computer how to handle the “madness” of the flesh. How he does this isn’t made specific. He taps at some keys, and a computer monitor displays 80’s computer gobbledygook. But he is finally able to pass beyond his early, failed experiment with a baboon, which turned it inside-out (good God, why not use mice?!). Drunk one night, jealous that his new sexual partner and scientific chronicler, journalist Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis), might be stepping out on him with her obnoxious editor and ex-boyfriend Stathis Borans (John Getz, Blood Simple), he “passes through,” as he puts it, unaware that a fly is in the pod with him. Afterward, his body seems to surge with new energy before an apparent physical deterioration starts to take place. Nonetheless, he is born again, and evangelical about it. This leads to one of the most Cronenbergian monologues in the director’s filmography:

You’re afraid to dive into the plasma pool, aren’t you? You’re afraid to be destroyed and recreated, aren’t you? I’ll bet you think that you woke me up about the flesh, don’t you? But you only know society’s straight line about the flesh. You can’t penetrate beyond society’s sick, gray, fear of the flesh. Drink deep, or taste not, the plasma spring! You see what I’m saying? And I’m not just talking about sex and penetration. I’m talking about penetration beyond the veil of the flesh! A deep penetrating dive into the plasma pool!

As Max said in Videodrome, “Long live the new flesh!” But this new flesh – which eventually does drop off “Brundlefly” like the deep-fried skin of an onion ring – is obligated to technology. His final transformation in fact involves a horrific merging with the telepod itself, the ribcage-like exterior of the pod fusing with his spine.

The Polish poster for “The Fly” emphasizes what’s really important: vomit. Also note that Brundle hasn’t shaved in a while.

It is equally important what he is turning into: “Brundlefly” is losing his humanity at a rapid rate, more and more becoming the insect. This is Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” as a horror movie; if Gregor Samsa’s insect was recognizably human, Seth Brundle’s reveals a ruthless, amoral, animal instinct that may lurk beneath every man’s flesh. Brundle’s insectoid impulses drive him to cheat on Veronica with a barfly (joke intentional on Cronenberg’s part?) after “winning” her in a physical contest against another man, an arm wrestling match for the ages. When he finally confronts Stathis in his torn-to-pieces apartment, methodically mutilating him, it’s an expression of his jealousy toward his nemesis – manifested in acidic puke. The relationship between Brundle and Veronica is the heart of the film, and the performances by Goldblum and Davis (a real-life couple for a while, and who have genuine on-screen chemistry) are key to the film working as well as it does. At one point, Brundle warns her that if she sticks around, he’ll hurt her. He won’t be able to help himself. It wouldn’t be a stretch to read the film as the downward spiral of a relationship that culminates in physical abuse. Central to this reading is a scene in which Brundle tries to force Veronica into the pod, urging her to become like him; he resents it when she refuses. Eventually, in the film’s climax, he does force her into the pod, and by now he has revealed what he truly is: an insect, a monstrous wall-crawling fly with hardly any traces of the human on display. But he’s also the funhouse mirror image of an abusive father. Veronica has become pregnant, and though she wants an abortion, he wants to fuse them all together, partly in an attempt to purge some of the fly out of him and recover his humanity, but also to become a nuclear family: “We’ll be the ultimate family. A family of three joined together in one body. More human than I am alone.”

The flesh fallen away, the transformation complete.

No mistake, The Fly is a strange film. It’s a Hollywood blockbuster from an auteur horror director; he had initially come to Hollywood to make Total Recall, but found more potential to express his pet interests in this 50’s B-movie remake. The first half of the film is charming as hell, completely investing the audience in the budding romance between Goldblum and Davis and the drama of Brundle’s scientific experiments. Then Cronenberg slowly shifts the tone into grand guignol. Toward the end of the film, he even cameos as an abortion doctor in a ludicrous gross-out dream sequence where he delivers a giant larva from between Davis’ legs. This is the style of black humor that The Fly possesses in spades. It’s a monster movie that gleefully sends up its own concept – Goldblum vomits, vomits, vomits, because that’s what flies do to digest, you see? – but it has more on its mind. It’s a tragedy, and like all tragedies, it’s all about guiding the audience toward the inevitable downbeat ending that everyone can see coming. Brundle’s not going to get his old flesh back. Once it has begun to boil, fester, and split apart, all that’s left is the macabre fascination with what he might look like underneath it all.

So what did I think, after a lifetime’s worth of anticipation? Naturally there was a certain disappointment; a part of me, I think, would rather never have seen it, since it couldn’t possibly have lived up to such expectations. No movie could. I wouldn’t rank it toward the top of Cronenberg’s films, yet it’s satisfying to see him flex his intellectual obsessions on a Hollywood budget, with a simple sci-fi plot on which he could hang whatever he liked. Like the Brundlefly, it’s a very unique hybrid. And my wife marveled that I grabbed a bite to eat while watching it. “How can you eat?” she said. At least it wasn’t split pea soup.

Up next: The Fly II!

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The Thief and the Cobbler: A Moment in Time (1992)

Posted on March 5, 2017 at 11:51 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Richard Williams, the legendary Canadian-born animator who authored The Animator’s Survival Kit and won an Oscar for Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), spent almost three decades of his life trying to complete an Arabian Nights-style adventure pushing the animated form to its limit. One of its working titles was The Thief and the Cobbler, the name by which it’s now known. Countless animators worked on the project over the years, and some of the talent involved passed away during the film’s production. With the finish line finally in sight, the film was taken from him and completed by other hands. Worst of all, it was completed in ways antithetical to his intentions. Williams never wanted to make a Disney movie. But after the popularity of The Little Mermaid (1989), and with Aladdin (1992) on the cusp of release – its themes very similar to The Thief and the Cobbler – musical numbers were added to his film without his consent. The cobbler Tack, intended to be a mute tribute to silent film stars like Chaplin, Keaton, and Langdon, was now given a celebrity voice. The movie had become Disney-fied. Yet it could never be that kind of movie fully, and the body rejected the transplant. For years animation fans have traded bootlegs and tried to reconstruct Williams’ original vision. Even Roy E. Disney, always a champion for animation history inside an increasingly corporate behemoth, lobbied for its proper restoration and completion. In 2006, Garrett Gilchrist compiled the most complete version of the film, called it “The Recobbled Cut,” and uploaded it to the YouTube site The Thief Archive. A documentary about The Thief and the Cobbler, The Persistence of Vision, was released in 2012 without Williams’ participation, and awareness of the remarkable film was spread. Finally, in 2013, the original workprint – the last version of the film over which Williams had complete creative control – was screened in Los Angeles and London, with the new title The Thief and the Cobbler: A Moment in Time, words that acknowledge its incomplete state. I had the pleasure of watching this workprint last night at the University of Wisconsin’s Cinematheque.

The Princess Yum-Yum: sketch used in place of an unfinished animated scene.

When Williams initiated the project in 1964, it was something quite different, an adaptation of the tales of the 13th century Sufi wise man Mulla Nasrudin as collected by the 20th century Sufi author and scholar Idries Shah. (Williams illustrated Shah’s book The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin in 1966.) This film progressed far before it was abandoned in 1972 when Williams’ relationship with the Shah family, and a potential deal with Paramount, collapsed. Williams was forced to begin almost from scratch, but he persisted, working from a much simpler, original story by composer Howard Blake (to be re-written by Williams and Margaret French), retaining the Persian influence. His studio, with Ken Harris (How the Grinch Stole Christmas) as the lead animator and contributions from other noted animators including Grim Natwick (who drew Betty Boop) and Art Babbitt (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia), continued working on the film whenever they could, but without a consistent source of financing, it was a side project, a labor of love. Voice artists carried over from the original film included Sir Anthony Quayle (Lawrence of Arabia), Vincent Price, and Donald Pleasence. The film grew elaborately and wildly in all directions, like a strange fungus overflowing from its petri dish. Williams’ intentions for the film were not modest. As he described in a 1989 interview with Thames News, “I’m just trying to do what they call a masterpiece. When you master a medium, in the old days, if you were a master painter, then you did your masterpiece…I’ve mastered this medium at last, and I’m going to do a masterpiece, I hope, if I can ever finish the thing.” Key completed sequences in the film make this clear, notably in the “war machines” climax, an excruciatingly detailed and very lengthy action scene which is perhaps what a mammoth pinball machine designed by Rube Goldberg might look like. This exquisitely animated setpiece was completed with financing from a Saudi Arabian prince in 1978. When deadlines were missed and Williams exceeded the prince’s budget by 150%, the financier backed out and the project reached yet another dead end.

The thief and the cobbler, Tack.

Efforts were revitalized when Jake Eberts (The Name of the Rose) joined as producer, eventually injecting $10 million dollars into the production via his company Allied Filmmakers. A distribution deal was struck with Warner Bros., and a deadline was established through completion insurance. When Williams failed to meet this deadline, the film was taken away by the Completion Board Company in 1992. What he turned over was his workprint – the “Moment in Time.” It would go on to be completed under the guidance of animation producer Fred Calvert, who struggled to match Williams’ high standards of animation while adding elements to make the film more commercial, including songs, and a voice for Tack (Matthew Broderick); despite his efforts, the new additions are the most mediocre parts of the film. This 1993 cut, The Princess and the Cobbler, played in Australia and South Africa. I own the Australian pan-and-scan DVD, because for years this version was the closest to Williams’ original. Miramax acquired the film, and under Harvey Weinstein further slashed its length and released it as an afterthought in 1995, now calling it Arabian Knight. If you’ve seen it at all, this is probably the version you’ve seen. But viewing the workprint, The Thief and the Cobbler: A Moment in Time, is to witness a delightfully inventive animated film that is tantalizingly close to completion. It’s spectacular at times, but many scenes are left as pencil-drawn test footage or storyboards. It also features a temp score – often using Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade,” naturally – and is missing some sound effects, and possibly some dialogue to better bridge scenes together. Of the incomplete sequences, most are expository or dialogue-driven, as though Williams was far more interested in the intricate slapstick moments, which contain very little dialogue at all. Only a few of the unfinished scenes, such as the collapse of a mountain shaped of hands, suggest the same level of show-stopping hyper-detail, but then again, most of the film is rendered with an absurd amount of loving attention. If Williams found a moment to be too straightforward, he would eventually find a way to complicate it, to heighten it.

The dizzying chase through the palace, one of the film’s highlights.

What makes Thief and the Cobbler so appealing to animation fans is that Williams was pushing for the purest possible form of hand-drawn animation. Long scenes go by wordlessly with the Thief, in his efforts to steal three golden balls suspended above the city, like a kleptomaniac version of Tati’s Monsieur Hulot inserted into a Chuck Jones short. The backgrounds don’t follow Western graphical perspective, but instead pay tribute to the flattened world of ancient Persian art. Williams then warps this style into the realm of optical illusions and M.C. Escher, notably in the scene in which Tack the Cobbler chases the Thief through the black-and-white palace, swept along through endlessly spiraling stairs and continually thwarted by the baffling dimensions and disguised pitfalls of the backgrounds. Elsewhere, the Thief creeps toward a sleeping princess through what appears to be a white carpet so lush that it forms a giant hill; but he soon discovers that it’s actually the furry backs of the princess’ sleeping guardian beasts, and the floor revolts against him. And later he tries to find his way free of the grounds where a polo match is taking place, but the ball keeps following him, luring a stampede of polo players to thwack him and launch him skyward over and over again. Tack the Cobbler is an amusing creation, his mouth hidden by the tack it’s holding in place, always stitching and mending, even in his sleep. But both he and the princess (who inexplicably falls for him) are less compelling than the Thief, who sneaks along the edges of the story in pursuit of the latest prize. A clever conceit is that he’s always under the halo of buzzing flies, so that Williams can suggest his unseen presence by the placement of the flies, as with an extended scene in which the Thief tries to sneak his way up through the gutters nailed to the outside of the palace walls. The Thief has a doggedness which makes him as appealing as any of the classic Looney Tunes characters. ZigZag the Grand Vizier (Price) is also a unique creation, his long shoes uncoiling before each step like party blowers, always accompanied by his faithful vulture Phido (Pleasence). (Surely he was an inspiration for Jafar and his parrot in Aladdin.)

ZigZag (Vincent Price) and Princess Yum-Yum (Sara Crowe).

Much of the film is dazzling and funny, but the narrative and pacing are hopelessly clumsy. The unfortunate truth is that the film would have needed editing regardless, and even that wouldn’t have saved it from some of its major flaws. A journey into the desert with Tack, the Princess, and the Thief doesn’t accomplish much except to pad out the film and add a middle act. The invading army of One-Eyes, led by a barbarian whose mouth is full of sharp teeth, leads to plenty of indelible imagery reminiscent of Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards, but doesn’t demonstrate a lot of thought in the story department. The climax with the war machines is astounding; anyone would be fooled into thinking it was accomplished with computers, rather than Williams’ mathematically methodical renderings. It goes on too long, but every moment is rich with detailed gags. One could say the same thing for The Thief and the Cobbler as a whole. One could also observe that it looks like a film which had been in production since the 60’s, which would make it an odd commercial fit in the marketplace of the early 90’s. Maybe in a perfect world it would have been completed by the late 70’s, and become a reference point for animation enthusiasts for decades to come. Instead, it’s become a what-might-have-been, albeit more fully realized than, say, Jodorowsky’s Dune. The Thief and the Cobbler is, however, a “masterpiece,” if you were to use the definition outlined by Williams. None of its flaws are inherent in the animation itself. As a craftsman, Williams had perfected his craft, even if the object was evolving over three decades of his life as an artist and never properly finished. It feels particularly relevant and important in an age when almost all animation is accomplished within computers. Williams demonstrates the breadth of imagination and the degree of perfection that can be achieved entirely by hand – assuming, of course, that one has the time.

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