Frank Zappa Presents: The Amazing Mr Bickford
By Andy Gill
FRANK ZAPPA PRESENTS: THE AMAZING MR BICKFORD
Video For Nations. 52 mins
Mr Bickford is Bruce Bickford, the plasticine animation
genius responsible for the video to Zappa's City Of Tiny Lights.
That's not
included here, but what is undoubtedly merits the epithet
"amazing". We're introduced to Bicktord via his studio, where
the camera pans across shelves of little figures and dives into a
drawer crammed with a crowd, literally hundreds of tiny heads,
each with their own tiny individual expression. Suddenly we're
into the animation proper, initially a relatively straight
colonial altercation between natives and explorers which
degenerates into a bloodbath. Then, via a drawn sequence at
food-fart smells emerging from a toilet (don't as), we reach the
main “story", which, set to a succession of Zappa orchestral
pieces, unfolds as a daydream: bulbous little vehicles career
across a living landscape, legions are butchered
indiscriminately, the devil's head pops out of a pinball
machine, that kind of thing. It's hard to follow: narrative
threads of relative normalcy establish themselves for a while,
then someone's head turns into a bridge and a little bulbous car
drives up their nose. Don't you just hate it when that happens?
The sheer technical effort involved is staggering: sculpted
animation is about as labour-intensive as art gets, and here
Bickford's camera tracks, pans and zooms even as the entire
landscape mutates, a pulsing mass of protoplasm in constant flux.
It's a formidable achievement, without even considering the
bizarre nature of Bickford's imaginative flights, which at times
are like Hieronymus Bosch meeting Salvador Dali in a Van Gogh
field, only in three dimensions. Like the box says: Amazing. ★★★★★
Read by OCR software. If you spot errors, let me know afka (at) afka.net