Director – Phil Mulloy – 2001 – UK – Cert. 18 – shorts of various lengths, total running time 2 hr 33 mins – Original Aspect Ratios (various) – Dolby Digital 5.1
*****
To mark the recent passing of Phil Mulloy (29 August 1948 – 10 July 2025), my review from 2001 of the BFI DVD of his work.
About as far from Disney animation as it’s possible to get, British animator Phil Mulloy’s short films, produced on a shoestring, employ crude paint brushstrokes on paper with violent, sexual and explicit subject matter. But far from being sensationalist, Mulloy is a brilliant satirist, deluging us with graphic imagery to hit his targets with a vengeance, underscored by voice-over, occasional words of dialogue, and background music by one or two musicians (among them pianist Keith Tippett, Angels & Insects composer Alex Bălănescu and Taiko drummer Joji Hirota).
He first came to prominence with six Cowboys shorts (1991) featuring gunfights, lynchings, bestiality (with horses) and much more. In Outrage, a man and woman are pilloried for having sex outdoors. For ten long years, The Conformist captures and tames a stallion, only to be ridiculed on his return as the only man whose horse has freestanding legs not a wheeled trolley base. He promptly saws off his stallion’s hooves to fit in.
Intolerance (2000) and Intolerance II (2001) feature aliens exactly like us, except that their heads are where our genitals would be and vice versa. Intergalactic war looms when they become disgusted by the human custom of shaking hands (as obscene to them as the sight of their head-positioned genitals kissing would be to us).
(Mulloy would later make Intolerance III, 2004.).
Equally impressive are Mulloy’s Ten Commandments series (1994-6) and his four short films, including the hilarious (if uncharacteristically tender) The Sex Life of a Chair (1998).
Peerless picture quality aside, the DVD has one major advantage over the VHS: the DVD menu branching allows you to access each separate short (with, sensibly enough, separate menus for each series) so that you don’t need to watch the whole lot in one go or in sequence but can instead watch whatever selection you desire. There are no other extras (aside from a momentary Mulloy title sequence), but this has everything you need nonetheless.
Most animation claiming to be outrageous, offensive and brilliant is actually explicit but stupid. Mulloy, however, is the real thing. An essential disc.
Region 2 DVD £19.99, VHS £15.99