Twice Upon a Time

Saw Twice Upon a Time (thanks, Lea!) It was an adorable cartoon. The plot is slightly boilerplate stuff: land of good dreams vs land of bad dreams. The film's strength lies in the writing and animation. I feel like I'm seeing a film that has been imitated many times, badly. It has that 80s-style motormouth where all characters jabber nonstop and the gunky collage look of Ralph Bakshi's stuff but where the motormouth is usually wearying here it keeps things feeling pleasantly busy and slightly chaotic. The gunky collage is wonderfully gunky and often slightly sly. The animation is also great. There's some scenes where black ink is flowing through stock-photos of people in 1950s business attire and great effort has been made to make the ink flow as though it were a 3d space, around people and under desks. I don't know how they did it.

The writing is cute and busy. At one point the leader of good dream land is talking to himself about/introducing to us the minions of the good dream land, who are called "figmen of imagination." He says "Ah figmen, they tap dance not but neither do they fart." That's hilarious. The characters are the good kind of ironic reverse archetype. There's a big dumb hero who mainly gets in the way (and lives inside of a football) and a damsel in distress who winds up rescuing herself most of the time. The main characters are Ralph the all-purpose animal (ie, shapeshifter) (who is voiced by Lorenzo Music, of Garfield and Friends fame. I used to watch that show when I was a kid. His warm, calm voice threw a great deal of nostalgia-points this movie's way.) and Mumford, a comic mime. There's also a long-suffering writer of the nightmares and the pettishly evil leader of bad-dream land (who has "Nixon/Agnew '98" tattooed on his chest.)

So the movie's really good. It (or whatever it's imitating) has been imitated badly a lot, so I was put off at first by the look and feel of it, but it's so messy and fun I was quickly won around.

Edit: oh, by the way there's a bit of swearing in it. At one point the bad guy calls the heroes dipshits. It's nothing major but is fairly bracing to hear come out of a very silly movie.