Heavy Metal (1981)
Heavy Metal (1981), directed by Gerald Potterton and others.
First review
A fairly bold animated anthology targeted at the young male fantasy/swords and sorcery audience. Abundant violence, large breasted naked women, real fantasy sex and a generally goofy perspective on the whole thing. The hand-drawn art is not as photo-real as today's efforts, but reflects the vision of the creators as adapted from their printed work. It has enough variety to make the whole mix fun.
I think some people misunderstand the title: it doesn't refer to the music (which is mostly common pop/rock) but to the magazine of the same name. I read it from time to time back then but it was too brutal and sexually perverse for me.
I'd forgotten some of the segments. The loosely connected major stories are:
Harry Canyon: Hardboiled cab driver. Luc Besson must have fallen asleep watching this while writing The Fifth Element (1997).
Den: Nerdy kid ("It all started when I found the green meteorite") is transformed into a heroically endowed warrior on a strange world.
Captain Sternn: Silly courtroom comedy.
B-17: Eerie tale of a zombie bomber crew.
So Beautiful and So Dangerous: Stoner aliens and robot sex with an Earth woman.
Taarna: This one's different. It's fully one third of the whole film, has a more developed story and uses an orchestral score by Elmer Bernstein. The mute female warrior is respectable, not just a babe. She wears dominatrix leather goods (when wearing anything at all) and would kick the butt of any comic book nerd who crossed her. Strangely enough, this gives her a fan base. The animation was based on early motion capture from a human model.
Available on Blu-ray. Nudity and passion scenes.
Second review
Additional thoughts and I've added thumbnails.
I only occasionally read Heavy Metal magazine when it was new. It seemed unpleasantly perverse and I didn't get the humor segments, probably meant for a younger audience. The film music was recognizable but not very important to me.
And yet my movie going gang and I saw it several times in the theater. Why? We were desperate for works of the imagination, anything that would break out of the familiar grooves and inspire a sense of wonder. They did that here: it might be lurid, often comical R-rated sex and violence fantasy for adolescent males, but still -- the artists cut loose and went where they wanted to go.
I look askance at the contemporary superhero films with their numbing Big Beat Down climaxes, but perhaps they feed the same need in young people today. I hope so.
I saw something new this time, a scene transition in the epic fantasy Taarna:
Notes:
The framing story is pretty weak: the Loc-Nar, a glowing green sphere and node of pure evil which exists throughout time and space. In the original conception Taarna was the framing story.
Again I have to note the overlap of hardboiled Harry Canyon and The Fifth Element (1997).
The animation in Den looked very "French" to me this time, particularly like Fantastic Planet (1973), but there is no overlap in crew between the two films. Den illustrator Robert Balser also did Yellow Submarine (1968).
Available on Blu-ray. An alternate rough-cut of sketches and storyboards has a valuable commentary track. The amount of work that goes into something like this is boggling.
