Habfurdo (Foam Bath)

1980 animated feature

Rating: 16/20

Plot: On his wedding day, a guy with a great mustache gets cold feet and tries to get out of his marriage with the help of a medical student.

Starting the year the right way with surreal Hungarian animated shorts, my favorites being Istvan Baynayi's "Hamm," a 1977 short about the cycle of greed; "A Legy" (The Fly), Ferenc Rofusz's artistic look at a few minutes in a fly's life from the fly's perspective; and Jozsef Nepp's darkly comic "Murder for Five Minutes."

This is the only feature film from Gyorgy Kovasznai, and it's a doozy. I was hooked from the start by the chipmunk funk through rain and traffic, my kind of 70's animation. Then, a psychedelic trip through a room, as dizzying as that Rofusz short about the fly, before this reveals itself as a musical. Suddenly, I'm hot for large-breasted teacher although she actually turns out to be a medical student. Then--the guy, fantastic mustache, my kind of 70's animated mustache! These characters move like no animated characters I've seen before, and Kovasznai's animated always surprises with warping backgrounds, rubbery character movements, changes in head size, random light flashes. The music groove-funked its way into Hungarian hearts, songs about window dressing and having a lot of appliances. It was exhilarating although it did grow a bit tiresome by the end.  It was difficult to follow the plot, mostly because I didn't want to take my eyes off the ever-shifting imagery to read the subtitles.