Word: aachi
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...Paprika is a seductive sleepwalk, Aachi & Ssipak is a late-night run to the bathroom. Take the coprophiliac premise of South Park's Mr. Hankey episodes, and set it in a Mad Max futureworld. All fuels have been depleted in this cartoon-ageddon, and the only source of energy left is feces. To stockpile this precious element, citizens are obliged to defecate in public chambers and rewarded for their pains with Juicy Bars - poopsicles, if you will. The Diaper Gang, Smurf-like gangstas addicted to Juicy Bars, do the bidding of their Vaderesque overlord, the Diaper King, and have suicidal...
...improve upon the blurb written by Grady Hendrix of the Subway Cinema collective, the NYAFF's producers and programmers: "A vertiginous slide down a swirling toilet bowl of bad taste, Aachi & Ssipak ... has repulsed movie critics and delighted audiences around the world. Not since the animated anti-authoritarian head trips of Ralph Bakshi has a movie done so much so quickly: within the first reel it's dispensed more ultra-violence than a thousand action films, annihilated all boundaries of good taste and bent numerous intellectual properties (like Batman) over the table and violated them so gleefully they may never...
...jokes hardly register on the shock-ometer these days; Evan Almighty, with its hundreds of comic crap-takings, has been marketed to Christian groups. The scatological jolt of Aachi & Ssipak fades pretty quickly, as viewers' jaws drop, along with their resistance, at the movie's brain-bursting visual density. Elaborate backgrounds flash by in a nanosecond. A million film references - Basic Instinct, Aliens, half of the Spielberg oeuvre and probably lots of Asian movies I don't know - collide and spawn a zillion more. Director Jo wants his picture to be hip to cultural references high and low (Diaper King...
...would be a stretch to call these two frantic studs characters, at least in the Pixar sense. Nor are Aachi and Ssipak standard comic figures like Archie and Jughead; they're more Itchy and Scratchy - excuses for sadistic, sumptuously choreographed mayhem. The best movies may create story and characters that involve, ennoble or devastate the viewer; but not every movie has to. This one is not humane; it may not even be human. After a while, its glamour and vigor can get wearying. But, s--t, is this movie great to look at, from a safe, sanitized distance...
...Aachi & Ssipak remind us of the joyous freedom of animation: the freedom its makers have, and the liberation of the audience from the timid constraints of 90% of live-action films. The animators' motto might be: We draw you in. And in that magic or toxic world, anything is possible. Can a dream resolve our waking dilemmas? Can excrement induce ecstasy? Can duck sing a gay version of The Pirates of Penzance? Can a rat be a chef? In animation, the answer is always...