Nice Cats (1995)

Lately I've been delving into the fascinating and awful world of Mockbuster animation. Extremely low budget rip-offs of Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks films. When it comes to trash cinema, something about this stuff seems sleazier than exploitation. Taking advantage of the ignorance of kids and the ambivalence of parents. The first example I decided to explore is this extremely crude mock-up of The Aristocats awkwardly titled "Nice Cats" ('Artige Katzen' in German).

Mrs. Mcdonald is taking her three cats on vacation to Acapulco. Lauren, the mother cat and her two kittens Lucy and Lionel. It's worth noting that it's they live in San Francisco, I did the math and it's 2,400 miles. That's quite the road trip. By the end of a generic incidental casio jingle, they're in Acapulco and immediately Lucy is getting the itch to wander. Mrs. Mcdonald warns all the cats that there's talk of a cat catcher on the prowl so to stay near the estate. Lucy runs off anyway and gets herself catnapped.

"Bunny Fashion"

"I Love Cats"

In cat jail she meets a stray named Charlie, they work together to plan an escape. Lucy plays dead to distract the cat catcher long enough to bite his bunghole.

By the time they get back to the estate Mrs. Mcdonald has taken the two cats and gone back to San Francisco, an ass move if I ever saw one. So now they have to travel all 2,400 miles on foot, Encountering different animals and humans along the way who help.

The plot is inconsequential. From the onset of the first frame you know that you're in for something truly horrific. One of the strangest companies to piggy back the success of Disney, the German based "Dingo Pictures" is responsible for other atrocities such as 'The Dalmations'  (101 Dalmations), 'Toys' (Toy Story), 'Countryside Bears' (Winnie the Pooh), and the one I'm the most excited to see 'Dinosaur Adventure' (The Land Before Time). Run by a husband and wife team, Ludwig Ickert and Simone Greiss, and I suspect not a single other employee. The backgrounds look like they were hand drawn by elementary schoolers and the characters themselves appear to have been TRACED from the source material. All three cats from "Nice Cats" have the same outline as Duchess from The Aristocats. The animation style reminds me of something between outdated 70's x-rated cartoons and that creepypasta 'Suicide Mouse'. From the limited images I've seen, it appears that all of their films have the same unfinished dullness. If the animation and copyright infringement wasn't enough, the dialog is amateurishly storybook style; with a woman narrating for every character. She has no accent but the grammar and sentax tells me that this was poorly translated from another language. With sentences like "Breathing was difficult for many people because the air was stuffy" - in regards to living in the city, or when the catcher caught a cat saying "That was a successful cat!". My favorite line however is when Lucy announces "I can't find my damn hairbrush!" - apparently Dingo is notorious for sprinkling curse words into their films.

A few other things I appreciated about 'Nice Cats'...

the entire movie is poorly hand drawn up until the end when they board an 8 bit boat. Suddenly we're in a video game.

The placement of the characters over the background went beyond not giving a shit. Charlie is floating in the middle of the frame like some experimental Jean-Christophe Averty shit.

Cameo by fake Thumper.

The saddest pizza I've ever seen. This isn't even Crayola, this is Roseart half way through the school year.

This racially confused Italian restaurant with a pizza being flipped like a pancake and a miniature china-man wearing a coolie and holding two sticks in front of a closed pot. This may be one of the most confusing moments in film history. I am literally stunned.


With my own "nice cat" Egbert recovering from oral surgery, this seemed like as good a time as any to participate in this bewilderment. Egbert has the luxury of pain killers why I painfully endured in sobriety. 'Nice Cats' and "Dingo Pictures" in general  is a personal journey you must decided if you want to take. God help you if you're as masochistic as me.

Alice in Wonderland (1970)

Few stories have been told as many times with as many variations as Alice in Wonderland. Seeking out the film versions was more relevant to me in my post-adolescence. In the early part of my womanhood movies like Svankmajer's Alice and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders helped me find definition. Not only were they taste defining but in many ways character defining. I know I'm not the only person to take something away from any given translation of the tale.

It would seem that at some point in my movie-watching career I reached an unconscious decision not to actively seek out this once a desirable fairy tale. This may have had something to do with the Tim Burton film or it may have already been in the works, whatever the case may have been somewhere along the line without knowing I lost interest and felt another film version would likely not offer me anything new.  My attention went to new and interesting fairy tales from other parts of the world.

A few years ago I came across Ubu Roi, a bizarre French made for TV version of Alfred Jarry's play. The sardonic political satire was oozing with style and became one of the most visually interesting films I saw that year. Click here for that review. While Jarry provided the source material, director Jean-Christophe Averty made it his own. His was a style that reminded me of all the things I love. Elements of films I've obsessed over since I started obsessing over films. Something I'm always hoping to find, but rarely do. I stumbled upon this version of Alice in Wonderland while researching experimental French films. I possibly wouldn't have stopped to consider it if I hadn't immediately noticed Averty's name attached. I immediately knew it was going to be something special.

There are no subtitles so it's good that I'm already quite familiar with the story. It doesn't appear to stray and in fact at 2 hours long, it seemed to devote itself pretty sincerely to the book. I was very pleased to see a similar paper cut-up style that was present in Ubu Roi, but starkly contrasted to the monochromatic black and white. Alice is pulsating with a psychedelic handmade looking technicolor. A mixture of live action, animation and puppetry, it's a rainbow colored pinwheel that's spinning out of control. The quality wasn't spectacular, a third or fourth generation vhs rendering of what was already a made for TV film. Strangely, this added an expressionistic effect that's perfectly fitting. With such a strange no-holds-barred color palette and the film being slightly out of focus it seemed even more like an abstract art project. You get a strong sense of how Nightmarish Wonderland is through Jean-Christophe Averty's kaleidoscopic lens. Made the same year he did 'Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dali', I sense that his inspiration was pure and with budding technology he didn't appear to be fine tuning his method but let go a bit and express himself liberally. There's a lack of restraint that's thoroughly exciting if you're an aesthetic junkie such as myself. And really, with a story we all know so well extreme creative liberties are necessary to make it less redundant.

It's so refreshing to see films that not only still excite and inspire me but are able to help me reconnect with girlhood and re-examine the films that brought me to the place I am today. Averty's Wonderland might not be the greatest version out there but it's not to be dismissed. Like a bizarre puppet show saturated in a motley prism, there's something not quite right about it, but the end result is something that feels textured and adventurous. There may have never been a more Atomic Caravan-looking film as this. You can bet this won't be the last you read about Jean-Christphe Averty on this blog.

Heungbu and Nolbu (1967)

I'm not even sure how I came to land on this discovery. I fell into some kind of internet worm hole and this was at the other end.

Heungbu and Nolbu is a Korean folk tale about two adult brothers who are left an inheritance from their father. The older bother, Nolbu, is greedy and hateful so he kicks his brother Heungbu and his family out of the estate so he can have all the money and property to himself.

Despite having plenty of his own problems, the kind and benevolent Heungbu saves a defenseless swallow from a snake and mends his broken leg. The swallow is from magical bird land run by a lady bird queen. To thank Heungbu, the swallow gives him an enchanted gourd seed. He and his family work together to build themselves a modest grass hut to live in. They plant the seed and big green gourd grows, when they cut it in half to eat and suddenly prosperous treasures begin to appear all around them.

Heungbu bashes the snake until it's dead and bloody. This is where the children's begins to feel less wholesome.

Queen of the birds.

When Nolbu discovers the good fortune of his brother, he gets jealous and steals a seed to grow his own magical plant. This is where the film takes a turn for the insane.

Nolbu and his wife are first greeted by a vicious tiger...

...that breathes pink smoke.

Then a fire breathing dragon...

And best of all...

Nolbu and his wife are visited by a variety of spooky ghouls.

Including these absolutely amazing and terrifying Japanese-esque Onryo style female ghosts that look like a cyclops Sadako and green-faced Kayako Saeki. This is not the kind of imagery I'm used to from puppet films in the 60's. I could go on about the story, but why? I was really just leading up to this. These images say it all.

I've found very little information about this South Korean gem. There's a live action version from 1959 that seems to be easily confused with this one on the few sites I've unearthed. It has tinges of Jiri Barta's work and elements of the more recent Blood Tea and Red String by Christiane Cegavske. Despite the shades of horror, it's a bit too traditional to be akin to someone like Jan Svankmajer, though I struggle not to mention that fans of his might get some enjoyment out of this. It's a bit slow to start but once the magical elements take shape, it unfolds into a highly entertaining example of Eastern Kiddie Matinee cinema. I watched it without subtitles, but having a basic knowledge of the folk tale, it wasn't hard to follow along. If you're interested in seeing this one, I could only find it streaming on viewster...

Heungbu and Nolbu



This isn't much of a review. I'm not sure how to be critical of a flick like this. This post serves more to spread the words because as far as I know this has no Western audience what-so-ever. On that note, I'll leave you with all the weird-y cute animals from the film...