Bunny and the Bull

2009 comedy

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Agoraphobic Stephen revisits a trip through Europe with pal Bunny by discovering artifacts from the holiday around his cluttered home. The flashbacks include visits to museums, a visit to a bed and breakfast with a stuffed bear, and the meeting of a Spanish waitress who tags along.

A road movie through a damaged subconscious. If you don't like quirkiness, have an aversion to British neo-Python absurdity, or just despise anything inventive, you can go ahead and stay away from this. Wackiness keeps the viewer from really feeling the characters. They're goofy sketches instead of fully-realized flesh 'n' blood folk, but that's probably my only real complaint. The characters are likable though. Visually, this is wild and a lot of fun, like a Michael Gondry daydream, and although I wonder if it's something that would be funny for very many people, it made me laugh a few times. The stream-of-conscious gags don't come quite as rapid-fire as in the Paul King television show The Mighty Boosh, but fans of that type of humor will have a head start here. It's not all whimsy, however, because there's this melancholic undercurrent throughout this poor guy Stephen's story, and although you don't really know how things will end up, you know there will be tragedy. What you'll remember about this is that set design though, a blend of cheap animation and live action. It never looks expensive, but it does look like a labor of love, and it's just so much fun watching the camera zoom into, around, and through some of these sets, taking the characters in all these unexpected places. I was a little stressed when I started this one, and it melted a lot of that right away. It was definitely hard not to smile while watching this one.