Other Reviews in this Series.
Director: Sally Cruikshank
Writer: Sally Cruikshank
Cast: Sally Cruikshank, Kim Deitch
Runtime: 10 mins.
1975
First take ten minutes to watch this film on youtube.
Animation is one of the most painstakingly difficult artistic mediums to produce. It takes either tremendous resources or tremendous dedication, usually both. There have been more than a few studios and creatives whose career was demolished by an expensive animated flop. Plenty more animation projects have been artistically compromised by the encroaching necessity of cutting corners. The result is a lot of safe, unobjectionable animation. A handful of children's films a year with cookie cutter messaging that fit squarely in the dominant tastes of the time. This makes animation the site of enormous untapped potential.
In 1973, a young animator named Sally Cruikshank graduated from Smith and moved on to the San Francisco Art Institute. While working at a commercial-film company called Snazelle films, its president essentially gave her free rein to work on whatever project she wanted while churning out a commercial here or there. The project she chose spanned two years and gobbled up $6,000 of independently financed money. Cruikshank herself produced every illustration and her then boyfriend Kim Deitch provided the color. They would also voice the two main characters. The result was Quasi at the Quackadero, a ten minute psychedelic comedy about some talking ducks and their day visit to a surreal carnival. To call the film a labor of love would be an understatement.
Quackadero is aggressively atypical. The characters move like nightmare versions of classic Mickey Mouse or Betty Boop cartoons. The world springs to life with stomach-churning vibrancy. The pacing is breakneck while never failing to carve out the strangest, most uncomfortable moments. The style is singular. Cruikshank's sensibilities exist cattycorner to vulgar realism, as demonstrated in this quote from a 1980 interview:
It bothers me a little bit that most people don't explore the possibilities of animation. There's a current trend to put all the animals back in the meadows which I'm kind of balking at. Instead I'd rather have them dressed up and running around in these crazy worlds of mine. What's so wonderful is that anybody can do anything. Time can roll back, there just are no laws, gravity doesn't even exist. Anything can go on, so why not take advantage of that instead of trying to make them all run around the meadows?The privileging of the "realistic" is a Hollywood fixation that strangles possibility across all of cinema, but is especially inexcusable in animation. The more ignorant detractors of experimental or psychedelic style choices might dismiss them as drug-fueled nonsense, but as Cruikshank cheekily points out in the youtube comments for her videos,* "You don't need to take acid to have weird thoughts and imagine weird things."
*Cruikshank has been running her own youtube channel for the past decade, where she has blessedly uploaded a great deal of her work; she believes copyright is dead and figured she may as well get ahead of the curve.
Quasi at the Quackadero is, indeed, weird things. The narrative is split nicely into fragments. Each moment packs its punch and then moves on. It also makes it easy to discuss chunks of the film in turn.
Prologue
After the credit sequence, underscored by a riot of strings and quacks, the first image of the film is one of the titular Quasi in bed watching television. Already we are presented with an overabundance of surreal details. It would take five, ten, twenty viewings to process every detail the film offers, and tens of thousands of words to document them, but since this is the opening tableau it's worth going into detail.
Just on first glance: a dancing armchair, some sort of saddled rocking horse stegosaurus, a spinning spitting water fountain, a canopy bed emblazoned with the name of its occupant, a hanging television screen, and a tiny penguinesque wind-up servant holding up a dish for Quasi to snack on. That's not to mention the perspective-skewing wallpaper or any of the various knickknacks scattered around the floor and walls.
This litany of curiosities is a good barometer for the sheer amount of stimuli that will be thrown at us over the course of this ten minutes. Quasi's world is crackling with activities and energies; even Quasi's television-watching is active. "I love to look at pictures of people working," he tells us with perverse glee, which is all at once a bizarre phrase, a great commentary on television culture, and our first indicator that Quasi is an inexcusable dirtbag of an individual.
Anita's entry into the scene conjures up a familiar sitcom scenario--the lazy husband and the nagging wife, here represented by literal daggers manifesting from Anita's eyes. Like everything in Quackadero, though, the familiar is immediately queered in ways we cannot fully understand. In alternating moments Anita seems like Quasi's girlfriend, mother, or handler, further complicated by her relationship with their robot child-pet (?) Rollo, which we'll talk more about later.
Anyway, with both the dagger eyes and Anita's head literally becoming an image of the place she wants to go, we are already seeing exposition and character beats punctuated by bold animation choices that heighten the reality of the film.
The Quackadero
"There certainly are a lot of weirdos out today." "Really. Look at those three over there."
These are the first lines uttered by non-principal characters, and they function as sort of a winking joke about the parade of grotesquerie that we have just witnessed as the film establishes the Quackadero. Most of the character models are based somewhat on animals, though there are plenty that just aren't. I'm pretty sure I heard or read Cruikshank opine that she's "not good at drawing," which I take to be immensely inspiring from a creative standpoint; Cruikshank's art is a surrealist wonderland, and if this a work of someone without "skill," whatever that means, then we should all be following our weirdest bliss.
We also catch our first flyover of this world's architectural aesthetic, which is like M.C. Escher ran Rainbow Road through a cotton candy machine.
Your Shining Moment
"Welcome to Your Shining Moment, the humbling game where we probe your past and let you relive one of the shining moments in your life."
So we have the first carnival exhibit, and why not kick things off with the most disturbing segment of the entire short. Seriously, Your Shining Moment doesn't even crack a minute, yet I feel overwhelmed by the prospect of documenting each of its disorienting elements. And which is the most disturbing of all?
Is it the robot narrator, whose ominous portents are delivered with something like gurgling glee?
Is it the fact that the moment takes place at a vegetable convention? A giggling vegetable convention where all the anthropomorphic vegetables seem to be in on the twisted joke of the whole scenario?
Is it the appearance of Winky Orlando who, quite frankly, looks like the cliche of a pedophile, an impression only enhanced by the fact that he is the only non-vegetable at the vegetable convention?
Is it that this colorful cartoon plops down some duck nudity while implying an act so heinous and unspeakable that the reality of the simulation blinks out of existence?
Or is it that the scene ends with Winky Orlando protesting "that never happened to me!" leaving us with a sense of profound dread and confusion?
The thread of psychosexual perversion is thus made explicit, and will continue to surface throughout the film. It's worth emphasizing that Quackadero's exploration of the deep layers of the unconscious mind via machinery is made all the more upsetting by the cartoony playfulness in which it is couched.
Hall of Time Mirrors
"See Yourself at Every Age."
We return to Quasi and company for a brief series of gags about aging and perception. My favorite is the sequence of Rollo looking through a viewfinder that rolls back time. Buildings shrink into oblivion and roads roll back to reveal a lost ideal of pristine untouched nature. So much of Quackadero deals with themes of the encroachment of technology and industry, so there's something especially cheeky about a robot using a machine to artificially recreate nature.
Think O Blink
"Paints Pictures of Your Thoughts."
This is as good a time as any to mention that the sound design in this film is brilliantly rickety. The laborious creaking of levers being pulled... the suctiony sound of Rollo clapping... the mouth sound zaniness of Bob Armstrong and Al Dodge's score...
This segment is a series of visual gags in which constructed images give window into the internal world of our characters (not unlike the role of cinema itself--it's no accident the Think O Blink machine resembles a disproportional film camera). Rollo's mental image contains no Quasi, but has an obsessive fixation with Anita. She is Rollo's co-passenger, and her visage is plastered around the landscape. This acts as foreshadowing while evoking some sort of cross-species Oedipal complex. Anita's mental image is also obsessed with Anita, although in a more overtly sexualized way than Rollo's. Quasi's image completes the tripartite gag with an enormous Quasi about to gobble up Anita and Rollo, who appear to be slipping down his tongue as if it were a water slide. As always, this is both a character insight (Quasi is a gluttonous sociopath) and a thematic commentary (something Freudian about the interrelatedness of the sexual and gastrological appetites). Part of the nature of short form fiction is that every gesture must work on many levels, and Quackadero excels at exactly this.
Madame Xano and Her Fabulous Dream Reader
"See Last Night's Dreams Today!"
This segment eschews the already meager plot in order to dump us into a sequence of pure psychedelia. Cruikshank is showing off here, with each aspect of the dream dynamically moving into the next in constantly reinvented ways. The fun conclusion to this is that we never leave the techno-supernatural dream, per se, but transition seamlessly back to our main characters. It's as if the distinction between fantasy and reality isn't that important, and it shouldn't greatly concern us. The question of psychic/technological/libidinal boundaries is a constant fixation of Quackadero.
9 Lives 2 Live
"I bet you would leap at the opportunity to get one good look at yourself in those other lives!"
The issue of reincarnation is well in line with the subject matter of the other carnival booths, but this one stands apart for one curious reason: it's the only booth that is explicitly a hoax. Why this attraction in particular is shown to be pure artifice is a mystery to me, though it may be beside the point.
As soon as we are lulled into the rhythm of the performance, one of the actor-creatures lunges at Quasi, apparently unprompted. This is yet another sinister moment that unfolds without warning or explanation. Whatever it signifies, it seems to affect Quasi, who flees from the booth and into the final exhibit.
Time Holes
"Is that really a hole in time??"
This sequence is the literalization of a museum exhibit: behind half-assed boundaries are things that can connect you to other cultures in various stages of history. You could call foul on the practical set-up of the attraction--how could something so dangerous only be protected by a waist-high guard rail?--but if you're not willing to suspend your disbelief about such a detail at this point in the film I don't know what to say. There's even a brief gag that gestures to this conceit, with a man pointing out his besuited former neighbor rowing alongside a bunch of Romans in the belly of an ancient boat. The image of the businessman doggedly pursuing a very different kind of work is a striking one, and a nice capper to the film's theme of labor that was kicked off with Quasi sadistically watching the factory assembly line on television.
The lax security at the Time Holes also speaks to the weak temporal boundaries in our own minds. We consider ourselves to be rooted firmly in the present, but all it takes is a nudge or a stiff breeze to send us spiraling into another time. A nostalgia trip, a traumatic memory, a daydream, an imagined scenario, a hopeful aspiration. The present is a droplet in an ocean of experience, and in truth we spend very little time there. Our reality is weak.
Just so with Quasi. Anita and Rollo conspire to finally get rid of the self-obsessed, gluttonous asshole. After a cake-baited shove he takes a tumble into the Jurassic period, where we see him for the last time, content as ever, eating an enormous melon. Until he is bodily threatened by a dinosaur, that is, and his survival instinct kicks in.
*consults image*
No, not a dinosaur. That looks like some sort of prehistoric... pig... bug. Huh.
Epilogue
So that's it. Quasi at the Quackadero is very many of my favorite things: equal parts goofy and grotesque, earnest and ironic, high concept and low humored, philosophical and irreverent. But to call it "equal parts this and that" is not to do it justice, for the herculean task of a piece with so many aspects is to knit them together into a coherent whole. The particular brilliance of Quackadero is that if you take any specific moment from its piecemeal narrative, it strikes one as borderline incoherent, but taken as a whole the film is a maniacally cogent exploration of the nexus between technology and psychology. To put it even more bluntly, Quackadero does Black Mirror better than Black Mirror, and it did it over forty years prior, in under ten minutes.
More importantly than all that, Quackadero overflows with the joys of cartooning. One can get motion drunk watching these distinctive, distorted bodies slinking through their colorful world. In the aforementioned interview, Cruikshank talks about how her consumption of old Donald Duck comics got filtered through her subconscious to become the vaguely duckesque subjects of this short. Now she has planted her fevered visions in our subconscious, so that they may warp into something new over time. That is every innovative artist's gift to our evergrowing culture--her very own time hole.
4.5 / 5 BLOBS
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