STRANGE TOONS: 500 POUND PLANET

500 Pound Planet was a confusing, rough, very strange but fascinating stop-motion film made some years back by Jesse Brown and Josh Doglin, two pals who were then not long out of college. They'd intended it to be an 8-minute short that would hopefully get them work as animators, but instead it turned into a 45-minute epic that took years to shoot and ultimately turned the friends against each other. It also didn't do anything for their animation careers at all, being too weird for TV and too long to play in festivals. Jesse went on to be a public radio host and Josh became the "hiphop klezmer" performer, Socalled.

Brown has now posted the film online, and it seems inevitable that this thing is going to acquire a large cult following in a hurry. Brown describes it as a "weirdo sci-fi hiphop buddy film", which is accurate but doesn't quite capture the full strangeness of it.

The film is set in an alternate, urban reality where clay monster people worry about drug deals and going bald, where the grills in grimy diners are powered by the pulped remains of sad little tribbles and getting caught by the cops can lead to a fate more horrible than prison. At times it almost has the rhythms of an early Scorsese picture, as we follow these two hopeless, bickering mooks around while they try to figure out how to get by in the big, bad city - but then things will take a sharp left turn into nightmarish weirdness, and we realize we are not in Brooklyn anymore.

It's sort of like the dark, urban fantasy Ralph Bakshi was always trying to do, only it actually works.

Chapter One ~ 500 Pound Planet from Jesse Brown on Vimeo.


There is also a prelude, which doesn't exactly explain things but at least gives you another few pieces of the puzzle.

It appears that neither Brown or Doglin has been active in animation for a while, which is a real shame. These guys were really doing something special, and whatever their talents in public radio or klezmer/hiphop, it seems like they missed their calling. Brown is a featured blogger at Boing Boing right now and he's using the opportunity to show 500 Pound Planet to a new audience. Here's hoping somebody in that audience works for Adult Swim.