Back in the late eighties, the days of British satellite television's infancy, when they would cheerfully screen just about any old shit they could find on tape, I once stayed home from school. I may have had a cold or an upset stomach, although it is also perfectly possible that I was shamming to avoid my Wodehousian dragon of a headmistress. In any case, there I was, huddled at one end of the sofa, flicking gingerly through the eight or so channels.
Until recently, this is all I could remember with any certainty. I believed that I had seen a film that morning, an animated film that couldn't have looked or acted more different from any other animation I'd ever seen. But the few things that protruded from my memories didn't serve to reassure me it had been anything other than a hallucination:
1. A woman is fleeing from a lobotomised Roger Ramjet type across a gymnasium with a floor painted like a gridiron field. She shrieks "Get away from me, you sex maniac!" as she makes for a door marked 'Exit'. Stepping through it, she finds herself in blank, empty space, and plummets from sight.
2. A bespectacled orange thing of indeterminate shape with a neurotic voice.
3. A man of no importance dangles from a clockface, Harold Lloyd-fashion, except this time he loses his grip and falls shrieking from sight, and it is funny.
4. A photocopier that tries to eat people.
The points above were almost everything that I could remember. I could remember laughing my head off, especially at the scene with the clockface, but couldn't remember why. Compared to the cartoons that I had seen - and thanks to Rolf Harris, being awake and tuned to BBC1 after the football results on a Saturday afternoon was all one needed to gain a pretty broad awareness of the previous fifty years or so of animation - it had an altogether sneakier sensibility, and it looked like absolutely nothing else. I seemed to remember the characters being snarky and sarcastic about each other and the film itself, which demonstrated a certain morbid humour that you certainly didn't get with The Raccoons.
But given that I could remember very little of the plot, which is wafer-thin anyway, I was screwed. I knew it wasn't Disney; I knew it wasn't Ralph Bakshi. I was pretty certain it wasn't Japanese, I was just about certain it wasn't British, and - although the humour and imagination was just about consistent with something like I Married A Strange Person! - I knew it wasn't one of Bill Plympton's.
It wasn't until the 29th this year just gone, 2009, that a fragment of recollection dropped into my head and I found myself engaged in a long grind through Wikipedia's page of animated feature films. (I made a donation not so long ago. With Geocities and other repositories of folk memory going dark forever month by month, you probably should, too.)
I basically started at 1993 and clicked my way backward through each entry. Once I got to 1983, I found it. Bam. A few minutes later, I'd found a transcription of a sooty old VHS dub on Google Video, too. I lay there sweltering with flu and watched it. Vindication.
Not that I want to spoil this for you, but in my opinion this is one of the most gloriously weird animated films going, up there with the aforementioned Plympton's stuff and Yellow Submarine. There's wacky and then there's just whacked. Given that the primary protagonist is "Ralph, The All-Purpose Animal" and the primary antagonist is named "Synonamess Botch" - who just happens to have a tattoo on his stomach promoting the '68 Nixon/Agnew campaign - you'd be forgiven for suspecting this to be wacky, and moving on. But friends, I assure you, it's fully whacked, luminously beautiful, backlit stop-motion splendour. And nothing spells 'surreal' like the film's depiction of our own world, particularly after ... well, you'll see ...
You'll need about an hour and twenty minutes to watch the whole thing. The music for the opening and closing titles are very 1983, but please don't let that put you off. The rest of the score is much more obscure.
Lorenzo Music had the best voice anyone ever had, didn't he? God, it gives me goosebumps.
There are so many weird points about the production of this picture - all the animation created with backlit translucent cut-outs! dialogue mostly improvised by a cast of comedians! a Scene Animator credit for "Mrs. Hamm's Boy, Randy"! another credit for 'Vulture Percussion'! and not forgetting Special Photographic Effects by NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD DAVID FINCHER! - that I'm sure I can't do them justice, especially as I'd basically be cribbing from other people's investigations and hard work.
Taylor Jenssen's piece here is a much more thorough introduction, as well as a taster for his longer piece in Animation Blast #9.
The dependably brilliant Ward Jenkins has two lovely interviews on his blog (part one, and part 2) featuring lots of exclusive images that really help to convey how unutterably gorgeous this film looks when you're not watching it from a YouTube-compressed digitisation of a second-generation cassette dub off someone's telly.
Sadly, Twice Upon A Time never really seems to have had much of a chance. By most accounts, the distributors tanked as the film went to limited release, and the fortunate few to have glimpsed it on cable or television play seem to be pretty much the only people who've ever even heard of it.
That said, something about this film kept itself alive in my brain for over two decades, through coming out to my parents and a bachelor degree and depressive catatonia and six years of brain-fucking professional employ and god knows what other ordure. The moment last night (as I write this) when my eyes scanned over "Twice Upon A Time" and one patient synapse sparked up in recognition, having waited to do so for over twenty years: wow, folks. Wow.
It'd make me very happy to be able to watch a lovely new transfer of this film, with all the colours and sounds and motion intact. Warners own the negative, as far as anyone seems to be able to tell. There's got to be some sort of mechanism to get it back into the world. Any ideas?
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p.s. Hey. All please hail and pay close attention to this special directive from your guest-host the mighty Dreadful Flying Glove who hereby alerts you to the legendary, long overlooked cult animation classic and doozy 'Twice Upon a Time'. Enjoy the discovery and/or refresher, and do tell him what you're thinking and feeling, if you don't mind. And, hey, TDFG, thank you a ton. Me, I'm writing this very early in the morning without anywhere near enough coffee in my system, and I'll very probably be either in an airport or on a plane heading towards Paris as you read this. As I mentioned yesterday, my travels, time change, and subsequent zombie-like state will prevent a new post from appearing here on Thursday, but I'll see you on Friday, at which point the old Paris posting schedule will be instituted again. Have a great couple of days, everyone.
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