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[ Graphical: Channel4 Homepage ]
The C4 complaints line will no doubt be jammed after the first showing of Quads, the new John Callahan comedy - yes, comedy - series featuring the everyday life of an alcoholic quadriplegic. Premiering in this week’s Hot Reels is one episode from the series, featuring the charity, ‘Gimp-a-thon’.
But Quads makes it difficult for critics to sermonise precisely because it is, like much of Callahan's work, autobiographically inspired. Camille Paglia calls him 'one of the most important anti-politically correct voices we have'.
Abandoned by his birth mother as a child, he was adopted by a couple who thought they were infertile, but subsequently had several children of their own, making him feel an outsider in his own family. Drowning in alcohol and self-pity after a car accident also left him paralysed from the chest down, with minimal use of his arms, his ability to use humour to portray his experience in his cartoons pulled him out. His comic strips appear in 75 publications across the US, and Robin Williams has bought movie rights to his autobiography.
'Social worker types with hyphenated names use terms like "handicapable" or "person with a disability" which is very alienating and ridiculous. Personally, I'd rather be called an invalid or a gimp and just be done with it.'
He has always drawn, and even pre-acccident had a tendency to use humour as an offensive weapon. He recalls one of his teachers telling his mother 'This kid's got tremendous talent. But we could do without the abortion gags'. He admits that 'when I find a thin skin, or a group with a thin skin, I will poke a few cartoons their way, because there's something perversely satisfying about a group that resists all humour ... something suspicious. You sense that and smell blood.'
Boundaries of taste
But even though animation can go beyond what is possible in live action, sex and violence can still provoke outrage. Ralph Bakshi's feature animation based on Robert Crumb's Fritz the Cat which raises hackles. He followed this up with another highly controversial feature, Coonskin, combining live action and animation.
The News of the World meanwhile was up in arms over a light-hearted film, Was Bugs Bunny Gay?, on the rabbit's propensity for cross-dressing, shown at the UK Lesbian and Gay Film Festival tour a few years ago. The programmer ended up in heated radio debate with Mary Whitehouse, who claimed this was an attempt to 'turn kids gay'.
And when Spielberg got together with Lego to devise a movie-maker's kit for kids, it's unlikely they had in mind the gleefully naughty gay dramas made by the filmmakers featured in The Next Big Thing - BrickFlicks (see Toon Commandments).
Hot Shot Robert Morgan made an impact with a dark and disturbing graduation film The Man In The Lower-Left Hand Corner Of The Photograph. His next film, The Cat with Hands, developed under the C4/Museum of the Moving Image animators-in-residence scheme is shown as part of Outrageous night. This mini horror film won the Rushes Film Festival's Best New Director Award, and makes its outrageous premise utterly believable.
| Brick Flicks | |
| First Commandment. | Thou shalt honour thy lego |
| Second Commandment. | Thou shalt not be serious |
| Third Commandment. | Thou shalt be patient |
| Fourth Commandment. | Thou shalt improvise |
| Fifth Commandment. | Thou shalt not listen to purists |
Best of British | Sci-fi
| Japan | Blaxploitation
| Outrageous | Music
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