A big-eared bull tries to protect his father’s magical crystal from being stolen by three sneaky snakes in Tiny and Big Pinely’s short animation The Bull and the Crystal.
In 1908, Émile Cohl’s French film, Fantasmagorie, became a true pioneer in the world of animation. Considered by many film scholars to be the very first cartoon, popping up decades before Walt Disney’s work famously took the crown, Cohl’s short film was packed with black and white drawings that seemed to jump off the screen. The effect it had on audiences at the time has been unsurpassed. Cohl created a new method that made his cartoons move. First, he drew hundreds of pictures, each slightly different from the last. When he played one after another really fast, like a flip book, these pictures came alive. Fantasmagorie showed the world what was possible with hand-drawn animation, a technique that would rule cartoons for most of the 20th century.
Today, directing duo Tiny and Big Pinely unleash their unique take on animation in The Bull and the Crystal. This three-and-a-half-minute cartoon throws everything at the wall: cheap thrills, ridiculous visuals, and a lot of bizarre and surreal imagery. Of course, the Pinelys are no Émile Cohl or Walt Disney, but there’s something strangely charming about this chaotic, low-budget mess. Even as everything was telling me I shouldn’t be entertained, I found myself strangely enjoying the ride. So, for the sake of this review, let’s just say they’ve all contributed to the world of animation in their own special ways.
The plot, such as it is, sees an angry bull with big ears rampaging through a village. There’s no explanation as to why the bull is doing this or even how long it’s been at it, but while frightening the villagers, he uses a magical crystal in the shape of a horn given to him by his father. To do what? Well, nothing of any note really. Apparently, though, the movement of the crystal from his head to his face is enough to alert three evil snakes who attempt to steal the crystal for themselves. What follows is a madcap three and a half minutes of utter lunacy as the bull tracks down the three crystal-stealing snakes. It’s a journey of complete nonsense with plot holes the size of small planets, but for some reason, I thought it was ‘fun’.
The animation techniques are either a sign of boundless creativity or basic laziness, depending on your point of view. They use cardboard cut-outs of characters coloured with felt pen and attached to sticks, set in front of an ever-changing backdrop of mostly paper, but sometimes computer graphics. It becomes a weird hybrid of ITV’s Finger mouse and BBC’s Hey Duggee. Crafting the characters out of the same sticky tape, glue, cocktail sticks, and sketchpad paper backdrops you’d find in any preschool arts corner is again either ridiculously brilliant or just plain ridiculous. The dialogue is obviously improvised because a lot of the time the voice actors laugh at their own absurdity, and you can often see the fingers of the people controlling the puppets. Does any of this matter? Not really. Much like Plan 9 from Outer Space, there’s some enjoyment to be found in the shoddiness of the short.
More ground zero than ground-breaking, the best thing I can say about The Bull And The Crystal is that it did indeed make me laugh at what I was seeing, but in the end I laughed at myself for laughing because it was all so incredibly stupid.
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