La Casa Lobo (2018)
—Rasiqra Revulva just got back from the video store with new rentals, but can't stop thinking about another re-watch of Showgirls.
Skinamarink (2022)
I have a core memory of being 7 years old and hearing the steady creaking of old attic floorboards in the middle of the night. I also remember deciding they could only be the sounds of footsteps. And not just any footsteps, but evil footsteps. Laying completely still, I clutched my zebra print blanket and stared through the popcorn ceiling above my bed imagining what horrors were waiting on the other side. Unable to cope with the uncertainty in silence, I slipped away, down the hall and into the living room with the Toshiba VCR. I turned on The Fairly Odd Parents, certain that the zany characters, with their formulaic positivity, would protect me from the unknown.
This eventually became a nighttime ritual. Whenever I felt uneasy, I’d turn the channel to Nickelodeon and fall asleep on the couch. My parents would scold me in the morning, saying it was bad for my eyes. But I was too young to give a fuck about my vision, and so my childhood fears were painted against the backdrop of cartoons.
I had forgotten about this habit of mine—having now smoothed out the knots of anxiety that once tortured my young mind—but then I watched the strobing light of a blue screen beam through a quiet hallway in Skinamarink. As if by Pavlovian response, the insides of my chest twisted as the details of those hazy childhood nightmare scenarios were reflected back to me in glimpses of animated shenanigans and atonally cheerful music. The image of cartoons playing through a dark empty house as terrified siblings Kevin and Kaylee piece together the hellscape that has become of their home was enough to evoke the intense, spiralling fear that only a child could feel.
It is difficult to access that kind of dread anymore. I am an adult now and have spent enough demon-less nights alive and well to be able to sleep through mysterious sounds in the ceiling. But I uncovered the innocent feeling again with Skinamarink: the film that found an unlikely touchpoint in televised cartoons and used it to elicit terror in a generation who grew up finding solace in pixelated colour.
—Brooke Metayer is a film and culture writer with an interest in the unusual, uncanny, and unreasonable.
Tracy Zooms In (2023)
“Hey, we’re all technocrats now,” Dick Tracy (played by Warren Beatty) says on Zoom in front of critic Leonard Maltin and host Ben Mankiewicz in the latter's TCM office. The two-way wrist radio has caught up with the times. The “flat aesthetic” of Zoom, in Orit Gat’s words, is perfected by the black background of Tracy’s big box: he’s stuck in the void, a signal of yellow trying to escape a black hole.
But surely he just means techie, not technocrat? No, it’s a telling slip, the right word for this ensemble of co-conspirators and egghead experts. The TCM special Tracy Zooms In (2023) only exists to formally extend the copyright that Beatty holds on Dick Tracy. The special is proof of life (Tracy lives!), but we’re watching a lack. Alas, no more Dick Tracy films for a while. The special dramatizes the caesura between the past movie and a future iteration. It is a property in limbo, and limbo looks like an exec’s office.
While the special we watch is proof of Dick Tracy's continued life, the Zoom screen that Maltin and Mankiewicz watch would be a weird psychological fantasy were it not played so deadpan: on it, Tracy is like a judge from outer space, calling from the blankness of a phantom zone, adjudicating the unserious spirit of Beatty’s film Dick Tracy (1990). As Tracy makes his case for Beatty’s unsuitability to the property that is his life, he shows scenes from the original film: dazzling, garish colour (“pink street… red street”) held in abeyance by the standardization of the teleconferencing tech, a vibrant clip show fused into the impeccably dull boardroom of the Zoom era.
The office offers Beatty an aesthetics of the indefinite—the hiatus of life during the pandemic and the pause on unreliable IP cash cows. The inner office in the special is even more dismal because it doubles the image of the board members: Maltin and Mankiewicz are both on split screen while also in the room watching the split screen, and then Beatty is beside himself as he confronts his doppelganger (Tracy played by Beatty). The fractal nature of the office pluralizes the technocrats and managers involved in the decision-making process going on in Beatty’s head. Zoom literalizes this psychodrama. In limbo, as on Zoom, management, surveillance, and intrusiveness are prolonged ad infinitum; colourful images can’t survive this self-critical hall of mirrors.
—Jonathan Gaboury lives in Tulsa. His writing has appeared in This Land and Solrad.
Cool World (1992)
Ralph Bakshi’s Cool World is the half-live-action half-animated Brad Pitt movie that tried to be an R-rated response to Who Framed Roger Rabbit? The tension in the film between entertaining animation and lackluster everything else evokes Bakshi’s insistence that Cool World “wasn’t a Bakshi production [but] a Paramount picture”. Bakshi is famous for his X-rated comedy Fritz the Cat, a film that proved animation could be decidedly not for children. While Bakshi’s career was preoccupied with extremism and shock value, Paramount was producing crowd-pleasers like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Play It Again, Sam. Paramount hired Bakshi in the hopes that together they could create something bipartisan. Unfortunately, Bakshi’s style was both central to his success as a filmmaker and antithetical to the Paramount mission.
Bakshi envisioned a horror-slasher that opened with a human cartoonist impregnating one of his female drawings, and then that half-human, half-cartoon would cross over to the real world where she could kill the father that abandoned her. The movie’s actual plot follows a Jessica-Rabbit-inspired cartoon blonde who makes love to her cartoonist, even though it is against the law. Brad Pitt plays the unsuccessful detective charged with upholding this law. At one point, in an attempt to stop a police car chase, a large cartoon baby pees all over the policemen. This is one rare instance where the convergence of R and PG-13 vibes works. Otherwise, Cool World is a depressive yet racy children’s cartoon.
In this world, the consequence of human-doodle intimacy is that both parties are then stuck in identity limbo, flashing between their cartoon and human selves. This sequence viscerally depicts the feeling of existing as a social media display picture sometimes and in person other times. On Twitter, my display picture is a little doodle I drew of a pink cartoon clock character within a halo of leaves. Whenever I scroll through Twitter, this little doodle at the top corner reminds me that on this app, I am not me, but that doodle. When Brad says to Holli, “you don’t have what it takes to be real”, he’s speaking to a current anxiety of mine: what happens to your sense of self if you spend too long between realities?
—Sara Abdul is a Toronto-based writer and illustrator interested in unusual art.
The Last Unicorn (1982)
Though there can be great delight in the communal experience of watching a movie with friends and exchanging jokes and pseudo-intellectual musings, I’ve long relished the comfort of watching movies alone and having space to ponder uninterrupted without worrying if others are bored. The Last Unicorn is the first movie I remember watching alone. At around 6, I checked out a VHS copy from the library and watched it on the little corner TV in my bedroom while lying on the shaggy green carpet.
I had forgotten about the movie until it was added to the Criterion channel in 2021 and I rewatched it for the first time in 20 years. The stunning visuals (created by Tokyo’s Topcraft studio which went on to become Studio Ghibli) and the offbeat '80s folk music soundtrack by the band, America, spellbound me in its bizarreness; I had remembered the movie being weird but hadn’t known any of the context. In the film, a last-of-her-kind unicorn—voiced by Mia Farrow—is turned into a human by a Roma carnival witch while on a quest to discover what happened to the other unicorns.. Upon realizing her immortality has been taken from her, Mia Farrow cries in her trademark fragile and fluttering cadence: “I can feel this body dying all around me.” I was taken aback by this line as an adult during the first winter of the pandemic—perhaps this was my own stranger version of Proust’s madeleines moment, or the soup scene from Ratatouille. This meditation on aging, despair, and loneliness was uncanny for my 6-year-old self to hear and perhaps more raw than the Disney movies I was watching at the time. I was struck with a firm conviction that I too would experience those feelings at some point. Rewatching as an adult in the stagnation of the pandemic, I appreciate that the movie embraced its eccentricity and took the children watching it seriously; I could feel my body dying all around me now too.
—Maria Byrne is in librarian school in NYC and sometimes writes, sometimes doesn't.
Naruto (2002 - 2007)
I am 12 going on 13 with rainbow retainers, a shag haircut, and a back brace for my scoliosis. I wear cargo shorts; I play World of Warcraft. I get home from school and turn on Cartoon Network. It’s 2006, my Naruto year.
In the series, Naruto himself and the Sand ninja Gaara are Jinchūriki—demon hosts. They’re often treated like the monsters locked in their bodies: villagers fear them, mentors are wary. The boys have opposite approaches to dealing with this, though. While Gaara is resigned to isolation, Naruto tells anyone who’ll listen that he’s going to lead the Leaf Village someday.
I felt like Gaara. I was under constant medical scrutiny, teased for my boyish appearance, and cripplingly self-conscious about the brace I wore for 23 hours a day. I felt alone and abject, monstrous in my body. I dressed up as Gaara for Halloween, dying my blonde hair the colour of blood and lining my eyes in black shadow. Misery loves cosplay.
When Naruto and Gaara battle, it is a clash of ideologies, the individual versus the collective. It’s so tempting to sink into the singularity of illness, to get mired in your own pain.
But Naruto had something to teach us. Barely conscious after their confrontation, Gaara asks how Naruto could fight so hard for anyone but himself. “They saved me from myself,” Naruto explains. “They were the first to accept me for who I am.” Gaara wonders if love can really make someone so strong.
Love, devotion—isn’t fandom in the same family? “I want a Leaf Village headband,” I blurted during a trip to the mall with my mother. She was perplexed, but she followed me to Power Anime to pick one out. I wore it daily, proudly. It definitely didn’t help me blend in among my classmates, but I did belong.
—Aleina Grace Edwards is a writer and editor in Los Angeles.
Popeye (1980)
A familiar roving camera drops us into a sunset lightning storm as the credits spell out “A Robert Altman Film” in crude, crooked letters, as if to announce that this is not your typical Altman joint—but in another sense Popeye is the director in his purest form, distorting whatever set of parameters are traced around him. The film’s narrative also concerns itself with an outsider challenging the internal logic of a constricting milieu. “Sweethaven” is the ironically titled coastal town where our growling sailor-slash-pugilist parks his dinghy, an act that draws the attention of the haven’s punctilious taxman, who might as well hold citizens by the ankles to shake their coins loose. The entire town ices out the Herculean stranger, sometimes stumbling over themselves to do so, until finally a door is open to him: that of the Oyls’ family home. When Shelley Duvall flounces into frame she is Olive Oyl—as if the character had been conceived to one day fit her lanky contours, her wobbly movements, and her halting, expressive warbling. Duvall is a walking summation of Popeye’s contradictory pleasures; she embodies a cartoon without ever resembling one, and she is utterly pure in spirit and emotion while being set against the backdrop of a cynical social order. Her singing is not “good,” but it is beautiful, and the other songs aren’t really sung so much as they’re recited by a committed cast. Performers throw every muscle of their bodies and faces into their cartoon mimeses, but a dissonance arises from watching cartoon-logic applied to flesh and blood that’s both wincing (watching a character hurt themselves in some spectacular, impossible way) and rapturous (the way gravity pulls Duvall’s otherworldly “He Needs Me” down to the swaying, swoony realm of the physical). The two-hour “live-action” sort-of-musical is by any objective criteria a misshapen disaster, but the mismatched sensibilities of director and material are its greatest asset, allowing for incisive and affectionate community portraiture weaved into a story of absentee fathers and devoted mothers (and vice versa) that keeps one foot planted firmly in arch, wacky toontown while the other is free to explore the possibilities of the gap between mediums.
—Alex Mooney is a Toronto-based queer writer who couldn't think of anything snappy to say here.
Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure (1929)
If you’ve never watched a detached cartoon penis running away from its owner, whilst sitting in a folding chair at a community centre, surrounded by strangers who speak a different language, I can’t recommend it enough.
On a recent trip to Montréal, my partner and I found ourselves swept up in the salacious élan of Québec’s libidinous heart. We attended a burlesque show, flirted with the idea of going to Cinema L’Amour (before balking at the price of a private booth), and, while looking for something to do one evening, stumbled upon a revue where comics, artists, and musicians performed routines paired with silent films.
Near the end of the show, a clip from a vintage porno about naughty maids began playing, followed by a woman, dressed as the archetypal French maid, emerging from the wide of the stage to perform a burlesque in which she pantomimed a rather erotic cleaning session. After thoroughly arousing herself, she settled down to watch something to continue her stimulation: Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure.
Buried Treasue is the first “porno cartoon” and features the titular Eveready trying to fuck (quite literally) anything that moves. Legend has it the film was the product of three of the 1920s’ major animation studios as a birthday present for Winsor McCay—perhaps the most influential pre-Disney animator and creator of the first animated star, Gertie the Dinosaur. This story likely isn’t true, but I think it’s wonderful that the creator of this dirty curio remains one of cinema history’s greatest mysteries. The beauty of silent film gags is that their humour transcends silly boundaries like language, and in this case, good taste. I sat there with my Francophone countrymen, mouths agape that we were watching an animated cow perform oral sex in a respectable public forum. Even if you’re into that kind of thing, you’d be hard-pressed (aha) to get off watching Buried Treasure. But put it on in front of an audience and you’ll feel another sort of liberatory experience.
—Quinn Henderson is a writer based in Toronto.
Face Like a Frog (1987)
“For what, for what, am I a nut?” an acorn laments in Sally Cruikshank’s colourful cacophony Face Like a Frog. Growing up autistic, I have asked myself that very question time and time again.
Masking, the camouflaging of autistic traits in order to blend into neurotypical society, was always next to impossible for me while growing up, particularly as I was forced to become more social during schooling and as my obsessive nature became increasingly obvious to those around me. Animation was one of my earliest special interests, and watching films like Yellow Submarine religiously in my early years was, to put it mildly, strange and off-putting to the Disney kids around me. The weirder the animation, the more it hooked me, and I found comfort in escaping my socially-isolated reality in favour of the surreal and fantastical worlds crafted in cel and stop-motion. This was when I was first introduced to Sally Cruikshank and Danny Elfman, two artists who not only had a profound impact on my artwork aesthetically but who relished in their strangeness, using their unique perspectives as outsiders to make iconic works of art.
Face Like a Frog, a collaboration between the two artists, is as simple as it is incomprehensible: A frog named Max is lured into a kaleidoscopic haunted house by a fashionista she-frog named Gluey. From there, mile-a-minute mayhem ensues, including a groovy Cab Calloway-esque lizard (played by Elfman) warning the frogs through song not to venture into the basement. Every creature, plant, piece of furniture, and otherwise inanimate object bursts to life with an eclectic energy that, while reminiscent of a childhood cartoon, also bares the perverse confusion of adulthood.
As I get older, the world is just as loud, chaotic, and bewildering as it was when I was a child, perhaps even more so. In many ways, I still feel like the same snot-nosed animatic addict but with far more responsibilities and relationships to maintain. Like our every-frog Max I am constantly asking questions, have no time to process the world around me, and am always leaping for an exit, melting when I’m forced to stay and interact. Navigating the world as a neurodivergent person may sometimes feel like you’re riding on a secret subway to Hell, but by finding community and accepting your otherness, there’ll always be, as Gluey says, at least one stop in Miami Beach.
—Raine Petrie is an artist and writer who loves new wave, maximalism, midnight movies and corn syrup blood.
300 (2007)
I was a 13-year-old boy when 300 was released in March of 2007. I don’t think it’s painting with too broad a brush about teenage boys’ aesthetic priorities to say I was the exact right audience for the film’s ridiculously stylized violence. But it was more than that that made me fall in love with the movie based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel, and it’s more that keeps me coming back to it now.
My friends and I had to “hey mister” a kind, random adult to buy us tickets to the movie so we could make our way past the film’s R-rating on the Friday afternoon of its release after school. That man likely doesn’t know he changed my life.
I wouldn’t be the cinephile I am today without 300. It was the first film that led me to argue “style is substance,” a position in which I’ve only grown firmer over the last 15 years. Few sequences have made an impact on me like the shot in which the camera tracks Leonidas (Gerard Butler) through several enemy combatants while shifting between wide, full, and medium-close shots while alternating through every speed between extreme slow-motion and blink and you’ll miss it speed ramped.
Seeing 300 as a young teen was also the first time I’d seen a movie adore men’s bodies; even if they were mostly the same type and colour. The ubiquity of muscular and mostly naked men, adorned with only red capes and leather jockstraps and lit in the film’s almost garish golden artificial light, made me realize that I might be attracted to men; or at the very least very much liked looking at their bodies.
It wasn’t until a few years later that I had my first crush on a boy, and my taste in men later developed to appreciate bodies more like Ma Dong-seok’s brick shithouse frame than the lean eight-packs on display in 300. But the film helped me realize something about myself right as I was coming out of puberty and that ensures it has a special place in my heart.
—Kyle Logan is a critic with a particular interest genre films.
Resident Evil: Damnation (2012)
Ever since the recent Resident Evil 4 remake came out, everyone I know has been talking about the game series. I, unfortunately, haven’t played any of the games yet, so I sit here, dodging plot spoilers and liking cute fanart of characters I know little about. Leon, one of the main characters of the series, has become a recent fascination of mine, so anything involving him that I can get my hands on is fair game in my eyes.
Everything I know about this guy, I’ve learned from fan fiction and 2012’s Resident Evil: Retribution, both of which agree (for the most part) on how he is characterized. Sure, he could just be another gruff action movie hero whose only thoughts are about guns, saving the president, and a female love interest, but you really don’t see much of that here. What makes Leon stand out is how often he breaks this stereotypical image of a macho soldier. One minute, he’ll be giving his fellow government agent sass, and the next he’ll be having a quiet, emotional moment with a grieving man. He’s a far cry from the stoic tough guy that most fictional special agent characters are, always managing to crack a joke while holding someone at gunpoint. In the most platonic way imaginable, I love this man, and I want to be his best friend.
Unlike the live-action films, Damnation and its sibling films are canonical within the games’ universe, making them a good place to start for newcomers like me. They introduce you to key characters and concepts within the series, and function as a good beginner’s guide to the franchise as a whole. I’d recommend trying one of the games if you enjoy this movie, but if horror games aren’t your forte, the movie has a sequel.
—Jordyn Streisfield is a young film critic from Toronto who loves video games, anime, and action movies.
La Casa Lobo (2018)
—Rasiqra Revulva just got back from the video store with new rentals, but can't stop thinking about another re-watch of Showgirls.
Skinamarink (2022)
I have a core memory of being 7 years old and hearing the steady creaking of old attic floorboards in the middle of the night. I also remember deciding they could only be the sounds of footsteps. And not just any footsteps, but evil footsteps. Laying completely still, I clutched my zebra print blanket and stared through the popcorn ceiling above my bed imagining what horrors were waiting on the other side. Unable to cope with the uncertainty in silence, I slipped away, down the hall and into the living room with the Toshiba VCR. I turned on The Fairly Odd Parents, certain that the zany characters, with their formulaic positivity, would protect me from the unknown.
This eventually became a nighttime ritual. Whenever I felt uneasy, I’d turn the channel to Nickelodeon and fall asleep on the couch. My parents would scold me in the morning, saying it was bad for my eyes. But I was too young to give a fuck about my vision, and so my childhood fears were painted against the backdrop of cartoons.
I had forgotten about this habit of mine—having now smoothed out the knots of anxiety that once tortured my young mind—but then I watched the strobing light of a blue screen beam through a quiet hallway in Skinamarink. As if by Pavlovian response, the insides of my chest twisted as the details of those hazy childhood nightmare scenarios were reflected back to me in glimpses of animated shenanigans and atonally cheerful music. The image of cartoons playing through a dark empty house as terrified siblings Kevin and Kaylee piece together the hellscape that has become of their home was enough to evoke the intense, spiralling fear that only a child could feel.
It is difficult to access that kind of dread anymore. I am an adult now and have spent enough demon-less nights alive and well to be able to sleep through mysterious sounds in the ceiling. But I uncovered the innocent feeling again with Skinamarink: the film that found an unlikely touchpoint in televised cartoons and used it to elicit terror in a generation who grew up finding solace in pixelated colour.
—Brooke Metayer is a film and culture writer with an interest in the unusual, uncanny, and unreasonable.
Tracy Zooms In (2023)
“Hey, we’re all technocrats now,” Dick Tracy (played by Warren Beatty) says on Zoom in front of critic Leonard Maltin and host Ben Mankiewicz in the latter's TCM office. The two-way wrist radio has caught up with the times. The “flat aesthetic” of Zoom, in Orit Gat’s words, is perfected by the black background of Tracy’s big box: he’s stuck in the void, a signal of yellow trying to escape a black hole.
But surely he just means techie, not technocrat? No, it’s a telling slip, the right word for this ensemble of co-conspirators and egghead experts. The TCM special Tracy Zooms In (2023) only exists to formally extend the copyright that Beatty holds on Dick Tracy. The special is proof of life (Tracy lives!), but we’re watching a lack. Alas, no more Dick Tracy films for a while. The special dramatizes the caesura between the past movie and a future iteration. It is a property in limbo, and limbo looks like an exec’s office.
While the special we watch is proof of Dick Tracy's continued life, the Zoom screen that Maltin and Mankiewicz watch would be a weird psychological fantasy were it not played so deadpan: on it, Tracy is like a judge from outer space, calling from the blankness of a phantom zone, adjudicating the unserious spirit of Beatty’s film Dick Tracy (1990). As Tracy makes his case for Beatty’s unsuitability to the property that is his life, he shows scenes from the original film: dazzling, garish colour (“pink street… red street”) held in abeyance by the standardization of the teleconferencing tech, a vibrant clip show fused into the impeccably dull boardroom of the Zoom era.
The office offers Beatty an aesthetics of the indefinite—the hiatus of life during the pandemic and the pause on unreliable IP cash cows. The inner office in the special is even more dismal because it doubles the image of the board members: Maltin and Mankiewicz are both on split screen while also in the room watching the split screen, and then Beatty is beside himself as he confronts his doppelganger (Tracy played by Beatty). The fractal nature of the office pluralizes the technocrats and managers involved in the decision-making process going on in Beatty’s head. Zoom literalizes this psychodrama. In limbo, as on Zoom, management, surveillance, and intrusiveness are prolonged ad infinitum; colourful images can’t survive this self-critical hall of mirrors.
—Jonathan Gaboury lives in Tulsa. His writing has appeared in This Land and Solrad.
Cool World (1992)
Ralph Bakshi’s Cool World is the half-live-action half-animated Brad Pitt movie that tried to be an R-rated response to Who Framed Roger Rabbit? The tension in the film between entertaining animation and lackluster everything else evokes Bakshi’s insistence that Cool World “wasn’t a Bakshi production [but] a Paramount picture”. Bakshi is famous for his X-rated comedy Fritz the Cat, a film that proved animation could be decidedly not for children. While Bakshi’s career was preoccupied with extremism and shock value, Paramount was producing crowd-pleasers like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Play It Again, Sam. Paramount hired Bakshi in the hopes that together they could create something bipartisan. Unfortunately, Bakshi’s style was both central to his success as a filmmaker and antithetical to the Paramount mission.
Bakshi envisioned a horror-slasher that opened with a human cartoonist impregnating one of his female drawings, and then that half-human, half-cartoon would cross over to the real world where she could kill the father that abandoned her. The movie’s actual plot follows a Jessica-Rabbit-inspired cartoon blonde who makes love to her cartoonist, even though it is against the law. Brad Pitt plays the unsuccessful detective charged with upholding this law. At one point, in an attempt to stop a police car chase, a large cartoon baby pees all over the policemen. This is one rare instance where the convergence of R and PG-13 vibes works. Otherwise, Cool World is a depressive yet racy children’s cartoon.
In this world, the consequence of human-doodle intimacy is that both parties are then stuck in identity limbo, flashing between their cartoon and human selves. This sequence viscerally depicts the feeling of existing as a social media display picture sometimes and in person other times. On Twitter, my display picture is a little doodle I drew of a pink cartoon clock character within a halo of leaves. Whenever I scroll through Twitter, this little doodle at the top corner reminds me that on this app, I am not me, but that doodle. When Brad says to Holli, “you don’t have what it takes to be real”, he’s speaking to a current anxiety of mine: what happens to your sense of self if you spend too long between realities?
—Sara Abdul is a Toronto-based writer and illustrator interested in unusual art.
The Last Unicorn (1982)
Though there can be great delight in the communal experience of watching a movie with friends and exchanging jokes and pseudo-intellectual musings, I’ve long relished the comfort of watching movies alone and having space to ponder uninterrupted without worrying if others are bored. The Last Unicorn is the first movie I remember watching alone. At around 6, I checked out a VHS copy from the library and watched it on the little corner TV in my bedroom while lying on the shaggy green carpet.
I had forgotten about the movie until it was added to the Criterion channel in 2021 and I rewatched it for the first time in 20 years. The stunning visuals (created by Tokyo’s Topcraft studio which went on to become Studio Ghibli) and the offbeat '80s folk music soundtrack by the band, America, spellbound me in its bizarreness; I had remembered the movie being weird but hadn’t known any of the context. In the film, a last-of-her-kind unicorn—voiced by Mia Farrow—is turned into a human by a Roma carnival witch while on a quest to discover what happened to the other unicorns.. Upon realizing her immortality has been taken from her, Mia Farrow cries in her trademark fragile and fluttering cadence: “I can feel this body dying all around me.” I was taken aback by this line as an adult during the first winter of the pandemic—perhaps this was my own stranger version of Proust’s madeleines moment, or the soup scene from Ratatouille. This meditation on aging, despair, and loneliness was uncanny for my 6-year-old self to hear and perhaps more raw than the Disney movies I was watching at the time. I was struck with a firm conviction that I too would experience those feelings at some point. Rewatching as an adult in the stagnation of the pandemic, I appreciate that the movie embraced its eccentricity and took the children watching it seriously; I could feel my body dying all around me now too.
—Maria Byrne is in librarian school in NYC and sometimes writes, sometimes doesn't.
Naruto (2002 - 2007)
I am 12 going on 13 with rainbow retainers, a shag haircut, and a back brace for my scoliosis. I wear cargo shorts; I play World of Warcraft. I get home from school and turn on Cartoon Network. It’s 2006, my Naruto year.
In the series, Naruto himself and the Sand ninja Gaara are Jinchūriki—demon hosts. They’re often treated like the monsters locked in their bodies: villagers fear them, mentors are wary. The boys have opposite approaches to dealing with this, though. While Gaara is resigned to isolation, Naruto tells anyone who’ll listen that he’s going to lead the Leaf Village someday.
I felt like Gaara. I was under constant medical scrutiny, teased for my boyish appearance, and cripplingly self-conscious about the brace I wore for 23 hours a day. I felt alone and abject, monstrous in my body. I dressed up as Gaara for Halloween, dying my blonde hair the colour of blood and lining my eyes in black shadow. Misery loves cosplay.
When Naruto and Gaara battle, it is a clash of ideologies, the individual versus the collective. It’s so tempting to sink into the singularity of illness, to get mired in your own pain.
But Naruto had something to teach us. Barely conscious after their confrontation, Gaara asks how Naruto could fight so hard for anyone but himself. “They saved me from myself,” Naruto explains. “They were the first to accept me for who I am.” Gaara wonders if love can really make someone so strong.
Love, devotion—isn’t fandom in the same family? “I want a Leaf Village headband,” I blurted during a trip to the mall with my mother. She was perplexed, but she followed me to Power Anime to pick one out. I wore it daily, proudly. It definitely didn’t help me blend in among my classmates, but I did belong.
—Aleina Grace Edwards is a writer and editor in Los Angeles.
Popeye (1980)
A familiar roving camera drops us into a sunset lightning storm as the credits spell out “A Robert Altman Film” in crude, crooked letters, as if to announce that this is not your typical Altman joint—but in another sense Popeye is the director in his purest form, distorting whatever set of parameters are traced around him. The film’s narrative also concerns itself with an outsider challenging the internal logic of a constricting milieu. “Sweethaven” is the ironically titled coastal town where our growling sailor-slash-pugilist parks his dinghy, an act that draws the attention of the haven’s punctilious taxman, who might as well hold citizens by the ankles to shake their coins loose. The entire town ices out the Herculean stranger, sometimes stumbling over themselves to do so, until finally a door is open to him: that of the Oyls’ family home. When Shelley Duvall flounces into frame she is Olive Oyl—as if the character had been conceived to one day fit her lanky contours, her wobbly movements, and her halting, expressive warbling. Duvall is a walking summation of Popeye’s contradictory pleasures; she embodies a cartoon without ever resembling one, and she is utterly pure in spirit and emotion while being set against the backdrop of a cynical social order. Her singing is not “good,” but it is beautiful, and the other songs aren’t really sung so much as they’re recited by a committed cast. Performers throw every muscle of their bodies and faces into their cartoon mimeses, but a dissonance arises from watching cartoon-logic applied to flesh and blood that’s both wincing (watching a character hurt themselves in some spectacular, impossible way) and rapturous (the way gravity pulls Duvall’s otherworldly “He Needs Me” down to the swaying, swoony realm of the physical). The two-hour “live-action” sort-of-musical is by any objective criteria a misshapen disaster, but the mismatched sensibilities of director and material are its greatest asset, allowing for incisive and affectionate community portraiture weaved into a story of absentee fathers and devoted mothers (and vice versa) that keeps one foot planted firmly in arch, wacky toontown while the other is free to explore the possibilities of the gap between mediums.
—Alex Mooney is a Toronto-based queer writer who couldn't think of anything snappy to say here.
Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure (1929)
If you’ve never watched a detached cartoon penis running away from its owner, whilst sitting in a folding chair at a community centre, surrounded by strangers who speak a different language, I can’t recommend it enough.
On a recent trip to Montréal, my partner and I found ourselves swept up in the salacious élan of Québec’s libidinous heart. We attended a burlesque show, flirted with the idea of going to Cinema L’Amour (before balking at the price of a private booth), and, while looking for something to do one evening, stumbled upon a revue where comics, artists, and musicians performed routines paired with silent films.
Near the end of the show, a clip from a vintage porno about naughty maids began playing, followed by a woman, dressed as the archetypal French maid, emerging from the wide of the stage to perform a burlesque in which she pantomimed a rather erotic cleaning session. After thoroughly arousing herself, she settled down to watch something to continue her stimulation: Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure.
Buried Treasue is the first “porno cartoon” and features the titular Eveready trying to fuck (quite literally) anything that moves. Legend has it the film was the product of three of the 1920s’ major animation studios as a birthday present for Winsor McCay—perhaps the most influential pre-Disney animator and creator of the first animated star, Gertie the Dinosaur. This story likely isn’t true, but I think it’s wonderful that the creator of this dirty curio remains one of cinema history’s greatest mysteries. The beauty of silent film gags is that their humour transcends silly boundaries like language, and in this case, good taste. I sat there with my Francophone countrymen, mouths agape that we were watching an animated cow perform oral sex in a respectable public forum. Even if you’re into that kind of thing, you’d be hard-pressed (aha) to get off watching Buried Treasure. But put it on in front of an audience and you’ll feel another sort of liberatory experience.
—Quinn Henderson is a writer based in Toronto.
Face Like a Frog (1987)
“For what, for what, am I a nut?” an acorn laments in Sally Cruikshank’s colourful cacophony Face Like a Frog. Growing up autistic, I have asked myself that very question time and time again.
Masking, the camouflaging of autistic traits in order to blend into neurotypical society, was always next to impossible for me while growing up, particularly as I was forced to become more social during schooling and as my obsessive nature became increasingly obvious to those around me. Animation was one of my earliest special interests, and watching films like Yellow Submarine religiously in my early years was, to put it mildly, strange and off-putting to the Disney kids around me. The weirder the animation, the more it hooked me, and I found comfort in escaping my socially-isolated reality in favour of the surreal and fantastical worlds crafted in cel and stop-motion. This was when I was first introduced to Sally Cruikshank and Danny Elfman, two artists who not only had a profound impact on my artwork aesthetically but who relished in their strangeness, using their unique perspectives as outsiders to make iconic works of art.
Face Like a Frog, a collaboration between the two artists, is as simple as it is incomprehensible: A frog named Max is lured into a kaleidoscopic haunted house by a fashionista she-frog named Gluey. From there, mile-a-minute mayhem ensues, including a groovy Cab Calloway-esque lizard (played by Elfman) warning the frogs through song not to venture into the basement. Every creature, plant, piece of furniture, and otherwise inanimate object bursts to life with an eclectic energy that, while reminiscent of a childhood cartoon, also bares the perverse confusion of adulthood.
As I get older, the world is just as loud, chaotic, and bewildering as it was when I was a child, perhaps even more so. In many ways, I still feel like the same snot-nosed animatic addict but with far more responsibilities and relationships to maintain. Like our every-frog Max I am constantly asking questions, have no time to process the world around me, and am always leaping for an exit, melting when I’m forced to stay and interact. Navigating the world as a neurodivergent person may sometimes feel like you’re riding on a secret subway to Hell, but by finding community and accepting your otherness, there’ll always be, as Gluey says, at least one stop in Miami Beach.
—Raine Petrie is an artist and writer who loves new wave, maximalism, midnight movies and corn syrup blood.
300 (2007)
I was a 13-year-old boy when 300 was released in March of 2007. I don’t think it’s painting with too broad a brush about teenage boys’ aesthetic priorities to say I was the exact right audience for the film’s ridiculously stylized violence. But it was more than that that made me fall in love with the movie based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel, and it’s more that keeps me coming back to it now.
My friends and I had to “hey mister” a kind, random adult to buy us tickets to the movie so we could make our way past the film’s R-rating on the Friday afternoon of its release after school. That man likely doesn’t know he changed my life.
I wouldn’t be the cinephile I am today without 300. It was the first film that led me to argue “style is substance,” a position in which I’ve only grown firmer over the last 15 years. Few sequences have made an impact on me like the shot in which the camera tracks Leonidas (Gerard Butler) through several enemy combatants while shifting between wide, full, and medium-close shots while alternating through every speed between extreme slow-motion and blink and you’ll miss it speed ramped.
Seeing 300 as a young teen was also the first time I’d seen a movie adore men’s bodies; even if they were mostly the same type and colour. The ubiquity of muscular and mostly naked men, adorned with only red capes and leather jockstraps and lit in the film’s almost garish golden artificial light, made me realize that I might be attracted to men; or at the very least very much liked looking at their bodies.
It wasn’t until a few years later that I had my first crush on a boy, and my taste in men later developed to appreciate bodies more like Ma Dong-seok’s brick shithouse frame than the lean eight-packs on display in 300. But the film helped me realize something about myself right as I was coming out of puberty and that ensures it has a special place in my heart.
—Kyle Logan is a critic with a particular interest genre films.
Resident Evil: Damnation (2012)
Ever since the recent Resident Evil 4 remake came out, everyone I know has been talking about the game series. I, unfortunately, haven’t played any of the games yet, so I sit here, dodging plot spoilers and liking cute fanart of characters I know little about. Leon, one of the main characters of the series, has become a recent fascination of mine, so anything involving him that I can get my hands on is fair game in my eyes.
Everything I know about this guy, I’ve learned from fan fiction and 2012’s Resident Evil: Retribution, both of which agree (for the most part) on how he is characterized. Sure, he could just be another gruff action movie hero whose only thoughts are about guns, saving the president, and a female love interest, but you really don’t see much of that here. What makes Leon stand out is how often he breaks this stereotypical image of a macho soldier. One minute, he’ll be giving his fellow government agent sass, and the next he’ll be having a quiet, emotional moment with a grieving man. He’s a far cry from the stoic tough guy that most fictional special agent characters are, always managing to crack a joke while holding someone at gunpoint. In the most platonic way imaginable, I love this man, and I want to be his best friend.
Unlike the live-action films, Damnation and its sibling films are canonical within the games’ universe, making them a good place to start for newcomers like me. They introduce you to key characters and concepts within the series, and function as a good beginner’s guide to the franchise as a whole. I’d recommend trying one of the games if you enjoy this movie, but if horror games aren’t your forte, the movie has a sequel.