Sonja Turbot: Existential Investigator, Page 3
Last weekend Eunsuk asked me to look for some Christmas cartoons to show to her class. I found A Cosmic Christmas, and this got me to thinking about all the independent animation that used to come out of Canada.
One of the formative experiences of my adolescence was watching Rock & Rule on CBC. I remember that my mother was worried that it might warp my young impressionable mind, and in her defense I think it did warp my mind, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Up until this point in my life, most of the cartoons I had seen were of the Saturday morning variety. It was safe, mindless children’s entertainment and something that as a boy of 11 I should have been outgrowing. From the cartoons on TV at the time I could tell that not even the creators were taking animation seriously.
All of a sudden, along comes a cartoon that breaks all the rules I thought I knew. It’s chaotic. It’s transgressive. It has boobies. It completely and totally rocks!
The odd thing is, I don’t remember whether I was expressly permitted to watch this movie or if I caught it on the sly. I can say that this movie helped shape my love of animation, and probably also my love of things that are just plain weird.
January 4th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Never heard of “Rock & Rule” before. However, the clips you have here VERY much reminds me of the infamous “Heavy Metal” animated movie. The adult content, the story plot, and even the illustration style are all reminiscent. I think it’s safe to say that either one inspired the other, or some of the folks who worked on one project also worked on the other.
January 5th, 2009 at 1:16 am
I can see that, get more of a Ralph Bakshi feeling from it. I also see a Carl Barks influence in the character design- look at Cinderella and her dance partner in the nightclub scene. With an appropriate wardrobe change, those two would fit right in in Duckberg.