Word: queerness
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...This week, while on vacation, I watched a few animated films: the Pixar movie Ratatouille, which opened yesterday in nearly 4,000 North American theaters; the Japanese science-fiction epic Paprika, now playing in 20 major cities; Aachi & Ssipak, which is playing at the New York Asian Film Festival; Queer Duck: The Movie, the tres gay comedy that's available on DVD; and for old times' sake, this year's Oscar-winning, made-in-Australia animated feature Happy Feet...
...Some of these movies (Rat, Feet) I loved; some (Paprika, Aachi) I studied with a cooler, appraisal admiration; and Queer Duck I thought just silly, sublimely so. But often, as I watched, I wondered: Why can't the makers of live-action films take one-tenth the care these guys did? Why are so many animated features bursting with wild imagination, coherent characters, glorious visualizing - all we should expect from film - and "real" movies aren...
...about spectacle? Satoshi Kon's Paprika dives into a splashy dream world for a parade of marching umbrellas, refrigerators and giant dolls that is as grand as it is eerie. Rambunctious comedy? Mike Reiss and Xeth Feinberg's Queer Duck is at least as rude as Knocked Up and yards funnier, whether its titular same-sex mallard is waddling up to the bar to order "a slow comfortable screw up against the wall of a bus station in Passaic, New Jersey," or enduring a spot of gay-bashing in an episode (from the 3min. filmettes on which the feature...
...Except when it doesn't. Reiss (a longtime Simpsons writer-producer) does the Queer Duck scripts on his own, and Feinberg designed and animated the original short films at home on his iMac. It takes all of six days for Trey Parker to write and direct, and with Matt Stone produce and provide most of the voices for, an episode of South Park. James L. Brooks told me that Matt and Trey are the only geniuses working in TV, and who am I to disagree with the guy behind Mary Tyler Moore, Taxi and The Simpsons (and Terms of Endearment...
...Queer Duck, though also California-made, couldn't be farther from Ratatouille. No family film, this; it's a bathhouse vaudeville of nonstop gay gags and homoneurotic songs. The movie sends its main character, Adam Seymour Duckstein, away from his menagerie of friends and lovers (Openly Gator, Bi-Polar Bear, Oscar Wildcat) to be deprogrammed by a preacher. After a dose of an ungaying potion, Queer Duck pronounces himself in love with Cameron Diaz and Camryn Manheim. Liza shows...