Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-review by Professor Popinjay

Yes, this is a Non-review for two separate titles. I don’t think I could bear a combination of the two into one film.

The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985)

The Star Child (1989)

The reason I watched these back to back and I am considering them together is because they both trigger my uncanny valley reaction and I’ve been trying to analyze why.

I mentioned my off and on adverse reaction to clay and stop-motion in my Wallace and Gromit article just recently and again way back in my Non-Review for The Box Trolls. I specified that neither of those bother me.

Will Vinton’s California Raisins didn’t bother me. I was a California Raisin for Halloween even! I can recall being super excited to watch the California Raisin Christmas Special. Clearly there was a time when claymation did not bother me at all.

Then, when I was but three years old, back when the Disney Channel was airing all kinds of weird stuff that they either got the rights to or borrowed to flesh out their programming… stuff like The Peanut Butter Solution (which scared the crap out of me), The Brave Little Toaster (which scared the crap out of me), or Anne of Green Gables (which scared the crap out of me). Most of what was on at my childhood home was Little House on the Prairie or my brother’s basketball games. Anything outside of these was deeply unnerving to me.

I’m kidding of course but Disney did have some weird stuff on TV back then and The Adventures of Mark Twain was some of it. This was right up there with the rest of the high quality Will Vinton claymation. It’s kind of a weird cerebral story much of which, in retrospect, really is beyond most children I’ve known. It’s full of Twainisms as one might encounter throughout his books but these quotes are archaic in their wording and Twain’s humor is often so subtle, most modern adults wouldn’t catch the joke.

The animation is beyond perfect. These are indeed caricatures, cartoony in appearance, and yet the attention to facial detail is immaculate. In fact, therein lies my aversion. It’s too good. These characters sniff, blink, curl their lip, hum and ha, their eyes shift about in a natural way, their five-fingered hands are articulate and expressive. They emote and gesture in ways unseen in most animation be it hand drawn or what have you.

It’s uncannily realistic for something so artificial. I watched it again in my adulthood just now and a general feeling of dread overcame my senses. I genuinely experienced nausea. But I could also handle it.

I compared my reaction at this to my reaction with the Chips Ahoy or Puffs Plus Tissue commercials, both of which feature stop motion animation. Those have similar realistic movements on human characters but their eyes are dead. There’s no lively spark captured by the animators such as with AoMT. I believe this explains my very different reaction to these commercials, namely complete and utter disgust. I can hardly watch those commercials without my skin crawling. Keep in mind, Wallace and Gromit doesn’t bother me! Anthropomorphic raisins don’t bother me. Tissue and cookie commercials? I want to claw the wallpaper off the walls.

Ultimately I liked AoMT the second time around. It is a bit bizarre sometimes, especially if you don’t grasp its source material. Seeing this after becoming a huge fan of Twain and even reading his full autobiography finally published in 2010, more of it makes sense now. As a kid I couldn’t understand why Adam, in the Adam and Eve segments, started to look like Twain. Now I realize the whole segment was more an allegory for his relationship with his wife. It’s actually hilarious and quite beautiful in the end.

But there was that one part. It’s not the part most might think about either. The Mysterious Stranger is a book by Twain, published six years after his death. It regards a character named Satan who encounters children and it has a rather disturbing ending as I understand. Honestly, I found the Mysterious Stranger scene in AoMT creepier as an adult than I did as a three year old child. As an adult I understood it as a reflection of human nature, sad and bitter mote that it is. As a kid I was clueless.

What scared the ever-living shit out of my three-year-old self however was Tom, Huck, and Becky’s brief encounter with Injun Joe. It was only seconds long but I’m certain it traumatized me for life. The model for Joe was grotesque and terrifying! He screamed like a maniac and tried to stab Tom! The caves behind him looked like hell! He reached out of the screen and grabbed me by the throat and yelled “I’m gonna stab you, Christopher!!! I’m made of clay!! ”

It was by far the most frightening thing I had ever seen as a child and it was compounded by the fact that this was in a charming animated feature! I’ll be sending my therapy bills to Will Vinton, thank you very much!

Well, I won’t dwell too much on The Star Child as I’m now sure it was not the progenitor of my clay-centric trepidations. I came home from second grade after watching The Star Child, visibly shook, but not really understanding why. All I remember is not liking the film back then. Who knew when some crazed mad man brandishing a knife was going to jump out and scream at me. My brother thought I was being a big baby and he’s probably right. My mom even called the school, asking what kind of crazy crap they were showing us.

After recently watching it again, it’s not so bad really. It’s nowhere near as masterfully executed as The Adventures of Mark Twain but it’s also not as terrifying either. It was definitely an interesting trip seeing something I had not seen again since second grade. It took a great deal of searching to figure out what it was called too. I had forgotten the title.

I watched some special features for AoMT. A group of fellas (possibly including Will Vinton himself) were fiddling with the pipe organ scene. Yes, Mark Twain plays a pipe organ in the film, not an Aeolian Orchestrelle like the one he bought in 1904. The most authoritative in this bunch is saying something like “What if, instead of mechanical movements, the various faces and human forms with which the pipe organ is festooned could come alive and sing the mournful chorus?”

Really Will? What if just everything was alive? THAT’s your inspired direction? You’re a brilliant animator and all but isn’t that the same treatment every form of moving visual media has received since the moving picture was invented.

They won’t be able to hear you so let’s have big emotions!

Okay they can hear you now so let’s really use those voices!

Okay this is an animated feature so everything is alive!

Okay this is claymation so everything needs to morph into something else!

Okay this is CGI so we can’t do hand drawn anything ever again!

Okay this is 3D so everything needs to be blasting into the audience’s face at all times.

Okay this film is gonna be ScreenX so shit has to be coming in from the audience’s peripheral vision at all times.

I understand demonstrating the capabilities of the technology to compete with home video but, jeesh, not at the expense of the story. Anyway, the point I’m making is all that morphing claymation stuff creeps me out too.

Boxarts!