I’m unemployed right now. I have been for about a month, and I anticipate that it will continue for at least a couple more weeks. You have to cultivate a rich field of interests and fixations when you’re unemployed, lest you go mad. This time, one of the things I’ve been doing to stave off cabin fever has been watching weirdo movies late at night. Now here I am, a proverbial cat with a dead bird in its mouth, offering you three movies I think everybody should at least consider trying to like.
First: Cat Soup. This is a 30 minute adaptation of an alt-manga series about dead eyed cats who are joylessly mean to each other and everybody else around them. The name “Cat Soup” is a translation of “Nekojiru,” both the name of the manga and the pen name of the artist. The source material is shockingly nihilistic, a remarkably feel-bad piece of work for how cute its art is. The movie, though, imbues a whole new sense of life into it, putting some real heart behind these adorable cartoon cats’ strangely vacant eyes.
The movie follows two cat siblings. The big sister’s soul is taken by a demon, and the little brother has to drag his now-soulless sister on a trip to the world beyond in order to get it back. The manga arc this story comes from is brief, and mainly played for a joke. The movie spins it into an elaborate adventure with genuine pathos and tons of bizarre, whimsical, dreamlike setpieces.
This movie is worth watching for the strength of its aesthetics alone. It looks incredible, and has a wonderful soundtrack. The animation is beautiful, and each sequence is packed with an electrifying imagination. Every scene is just completely fascinating to look at. My favourite, maybe, is the image of a giant clock outside the bounds of the cats’ world, which drives time forward. The giant man who runs the clock drops half of a melon into the clock’s gears, stopping them, and the cats are subjected to a sort of time warping phenomenon, leading to one of the most surreal sequences in the whole movie. I’d be doing it an injustice to try to explain it further; it’s really worth seeing for yourself. You could absorb absolutely nothing from this movie and still have a great time just looking at it. The music and animation also get to take total centre stage, as the movie has no spoken dialogue. It’s built entirely around simple and pristine visual storytelling that lets the animators flex every muscle.
To say that it could stand totally on its merits as an aesthetic experience isn’t to say it’s devoid of substance, though. The film doesn’t totally abandon the nihilism and casual cruelty of the source material, but instead couples it with genuine heart and pathos, creating an interesting tension. Where the comic is about siblings who are nasty in a world that is nasty, highlighting the meaninglessness of all of it, the movie is about siblings surviving in a world that is nasty, stooping to nastiness only out of loyalty to one another.
An early installation of the comic features the two cat siblings putting a series of bugs on trial, sentencing each of them to death for the crime of being a bug. It ends with one of the bugs convincing the others not to run away, but to face their executioners and try to win their sympathy by forcing them to acknowledge a shared sentience. This doesn’t work, and the siblings kill the remaining bugs. It plays at a grey area between funny and horrifying, but doesn’t really have enough feeling to reach either one, and ends up being sort of limply upsetting instead.
In a superficially similar sequence in the movie, the siblings find themselves adrift on a boat in the middle of a vast ocean, the only other passenger a friendly pig. After trying and failing to catch a fish, the little brother resorts to chopping off and cooking a piece of the pig so that he can feed his sister. He’s afraid that she’ll starve to death, as without her soul she is basically inert and can’t fend for herself. The casual cruelty of the siblings in the comics is recontextualized to create real pathos: the little brother is willing to do anything to make sure his big sister comes back from this trip alive.
Don’t let casual animal-on-animal violence deter you though, the way this movie moves is too dreamlike for anything to be truly upsetting. Once the cats reach the afterlife, everything is depicted with a severe unreality, such that everything which could be mundane is fascinating, and everything which could be horrifying is merely freaky.
Of the three movies I want to talk about here, Cat Soup is the one I would recommend to pretty much everyone. I think if you’ve ever liked a cartoon before you should check this one out. It’s a pretty stellar example of how much one can achieve with animation as a medium.
Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees is a feature length experimental film from the nineties, made on a modest budget by writer, director, and star David Blair, history-makingly streamed to the nascent internet at two frames a second a couple years after its completion. Today you will find it uploaded at a regular speed, but it’s still absolutely hypnotic, pulling you in with slow, sparse sequences, bizarre imagery, and a narrative that relies on a sort of free-associative dream logic.
The film is narrated by its central character, Jacob Maker, who keeps bees he inherited from his grandfather. These are special Mesopotamian bees who possess a strange intelligence. After growing disenchanted with his job as a programmer of flight training simulations for the military, Jacob gets more fixated on his bees. They implant a “television” in his head, which shows him a series of hallucinations, prompting him to travel to the land of the dead. The narration is so thorough in drawing connections between strange and disparate concepts that, much like a dream, the movie makes perfect sense while you’re watching it, and is almost impossible to explain afterwards. In my brief summary, for instance, I neglected to mention “the language of Cain,” an integral concept to Wax’s plot that makes intuitive sense while you’re watching the movie, but which I do not know how to define or even elaborate on beyond naming it now.
What I love about Wax is its bizarro aesthetic and absurdist narrative. The grainy early-digital footage is complimented with abundant early-CG animation, and the editing is full of bizarre frame-warping cuts, the sort of things that are nowadays the purview of amateur video. Here, all the possibilities of digital filmmaking are explored with serious artistic intent. It feels like something from a parallel universe where filmmaking conventions are different, and that alone makes it sort of fascinating.
The writing also has incredible style. I could’ve read this narration as a prose piece and loved it. It’s hard for me to even intellectualize the way I feel about Wax’s writing; phrases like “That’s when I discovered television among the bees” just sort of light my brain on fire. The film features a cameo appearance by William S. Burroughs, which fits: stylistically the writing is a lot like Burroughs, minus the thinly veiled misogyny and old-man-yells-at-cloud quality. Essentially, David Blair is like a version of William S. Burroughs I can actually fuck with. I can’t stand Burroughs, as much as I generally love surrealist nonsense. Wax totally speaks my language, though.
There are so many ideas packed into this movie that you could probably pick a dozen different things to fixate on and think about. What I came away with on my viewing was an anti-war reading. The film was made in the wake of the Gulf War, and its protagonist starts as a worker for the military industrial complex, specifically positioned on the frontier of new military technology. As Jacob Maker descends further and further into hallucinatory surreality, he is pursued and haunted by the image of the target reticle from his flight simulator. His hallucinations gradually warp him into a tool for the same violence he is fleeing by leaving his job, until he ends up as part of the dead’s plan to take revenge on the living. The image of the dead calls to mind, blatantly, the war-dead, and Jacob’s leaving the military industrial complex being put alongside his travelling to the land of the dead casts a parallel between the living and American empire, suggesting that when the dead take their revenge it will be justified. The whole thing is also soaked in a sort of Pynchonian paranoia, as the narrator’s discomfort with his role as part of a killing machine spirals out into hallucinations and surreal delusions. It reminded me a lot of the 200 pages of Gravity’s Rainbow I’ve read (I’ll finish it someday).
That Jacob’s job is specifically in the development of new military technology puts the movie’s narrative parallel with its medium, as Wax was, itself, an experiment with multiple new technologies. The movie is concerned with the dissemination of images of war as much as it is concerned with war itself, hence Jacob’s journey starting with a television being implanted in his brain. Wax manages to tell a story not just about technology’s power to enact violence, but also to reinforce that violence through the power of the image. Watching it today, it feels prescient. In the internet age we are more surrounded by the news than ever; we all have televisions in our heads.
So I guess what I’m saying is this movie made me feel insane. I would strongly recommend it to all my fellow sickos. I would also say it’s worth a shot if you find the early digital aesthetic charming, or if the music of the phrase “The Discovery of Television Among the Bees” excites you.
Lastly, maybe the most outwardly bizarre movie I’ve watched recently: The Flying Luna Clipper. This is a nearly 40 year old piece of digital animation created with MSX software, originally as a promotion for a Japanese MSX magazine. It has a simulatenously hand-drawn and pixelated look, which if you’re my age will excite dim memories of Adobe Flash and Windows XP. It’s also set in America, so the Japanese crew saw fit to write and voice the entire thing in English. The sort of alien old computer aesthetic and the second-language quality of the dialogue give the whole thing a powerful dreamlike feel.
And the dreamlike feel is fitting, because this is a movie literally about dreams. It has a relatively thin plot, concering the launch of a new plane called the Flying Luna Clipper, designed for dreaming. A contest is held to find the world’s biggest dreamers to ride on the plane’s maiden voyage. This is, to be clear, dreams as in dreams, not dreams as in aspirations. On the plane, the passengers are shown various “dreams,” which are, in reality, little multimedia short films, which the movie’s plot sort of serves as a framing device for. The shorts are also pretty plot-light, though. It is, first and foremost, a hangout movie, more about just sort of chilling out in some bizarre atmosphere for 50 minutes than telling a detailed story.
It isn’t totally devoid of content, though. It opens with a mission statement of sorts: “Everything is true in your dreams.” The movie which follows offers space to meditate on that phrase. How much you get out of this will depend on whether you think the phrase “Everything is true in your dreams” is totally vapid or highly fascinating. I’m firmly in the latter camp.
hile most of the movie offers only minimal rumination on the concept of dreams, the ending brings things back to the sort of loose philosophizing mode of that opening sentence, and manages to achieve a shocking level of profundity. I won’t spoil it here, other than to say that the Flying Luna Clipper’s final departure is touching, and feels legitimately meaningful, even if I can’t exactly explain why.
I’ve said it in some way or another about all the movies I’ve talked about, but it’s even more true here than before: watching the Flying Luna Clipper truly feels like having a dream. It has the exact unreality of waking up in the middle of the night and finding some bizarre show you’ve never seen before on TV, and then never seeing that show again, never even being sure that it existed. Its meaning lies primarily in its images, the impressions they’ll leave on your mind, and whatever the idea of “dreaming” means to you before you go in.
Really, I’m getting too heady about it. This is just a real weird one, existing at a unique intersection of obsolete mediums. It’s a blast to look at, and there’s nothing else really like it. At one point you get to hear a Japanese voice actor speaking English with a French accent. It rules!
If you like weird ephemera and esoteric internet nonsense, you’ve gotta check this out. I’m not sure I’ve made its case as well as the other two, but really only because its charm is hard to translate outside of a visual medium -- it’s actually maybe my favourite of the three movies. If any of the images I’ve attached charm you, or if you just want to see something novel, check it out.
The thought that keeps coming to me by way of a conclusion here is as follows: there is so much art out there. Specifically, there’s so much really weird art waiting to be discovered. It’s easy to fall into a comfortable media consumption rhythm, especially in the era of online streaming and algorithmic recommendations. I think there’s a lot of value in going looking for something strange and unlike what you would usually watch, though. Thinking about weird art is a lot of fun, and finding new stuff to like is a blast. And there are few times I feel a stronger fellowship with other people than when I’m checking out some strange thing somebody made, solely because they wanted to
The three movies I wrote about here are all available on YouTube, and linked in the text of this post. If I’ve made any of them sound remotely interesting to you, give them a shot!