Very un-appealing to say the least. Not nessecarily turned off by the animation but it seems a bit mean spirited.

Hm. They’re actually screening this at the Waterloo Festival for Animated Cinema.

Might have to see for myself if it’s as offensive as you say. It can’t be worse than a South Park episode could it? ;)

Its so disappointing to see 3d and 2d animation together without consideration to blend them. Seeing a flat 2d characters, especially with the level of after-effects like simplicity here, next to scenes of cars and helicopters with a much higher level of shading never looks right. I just can’t believe in a world without a cohesive design style. Racism, sexism and violence aside, I feel like the style choice is what’s most wrong about this film.
Other then that. This is a pretty odd film. I wonder what their target audience is, other then adult.

For something like this to work, it needs to be a complete self-parody. The second it slips out of that and just presents the violence/sexism/racism/etc. matter-of-factly, it becomes part of the problem.

Yea this movie looks all over the place! i cant decide if i think it’ll be entertaining or a waste of time. i’m leaning towards the latter, though i like it’s rather cute stylization mixed with its gratuitous nature. it’s hard to tell from the trailer whether the story will be any good, in fact i can’t tell what the story might be about, except the part where the man on the phone says “you didn’t have to kill gary.” but it seems like they only included that in the trailer as a gag. i think the only good part of the trailer is the end when he asks if he missed anybody to kill, and the guy thanks him for shooting him.

I would not call it racist, I think it’s only stupid.

The trailer plays well, but more as a parody of a gritty cartoon than a promise of a whole feature. What might have worked well in a graphic novel is merely perverse when set in motion. Translating from one medium to a more literal one (words to images, drawings to animation, or even animation to live action) is always a dicy proposition — and ironically, too much fidelity to the original is often a mistake.

I found myself thinking of an early Asterix cartoon, a point-by-point recreation of one of the books (Asterix in Britain). Every gag and key image was there, and they clearly could have gotten a killer trailer out of it, but it was deadly dull as a complete film.

that guy is a Brock Samson wannabe. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn the guys at Illusion Studios watch alot of Adult Swim.

this is frank millers worst nightmare come true.

this is a horrible take on SIN CITY.

>oVi

Looks like Frank Miller, Ralph Bakshi and the guys behind “The Venture Bros.” went over to Italy and did a lot of drugs!

I thought I´d chime in here, seeing as how I worked on this movie. It’s in no way meant to be taken seriously: the Boogie character was created by the great, late Roberto Fontanarrosa (a well-loved, very famous cartoonist down here) as an extreme parody of American action movie anti-heroes… so yes, the whole point is that he´s a horrible human being (racist, sexist, extremely violent, etc). Also, to whoever said it´s a Brock Samson wannabe, the character was created in the 70´s…so..no.
I don´t think the flick is perfect by any means, but I know for a fact everybody who worked on it put a huge amount of effort on it and, as far as Argentine animated movies go, this one at least took some interesting visual and thematic risks (most movies produced here are cheap, cutesy, kiddie crap) So, again, I don´t think it´s a classic or anything, but hey, I´m still kinda proud of it. Just my 2 cents.

This reminds me in essence of Assy McGee: an unlikable protagonist who kills people just because he feels like it.

I’m with Leo. Racist? And “Brock Samson wanna-be?” Yes, because Brock Samson is that original of a character, a brilliant, timeless creation, a yardstick of ingenuity. How about we all expand our knowledge a bit beyond American late-night fare, and not throw around terms like “racist” simply to attack something that isn’t to our tastes?

Great job, Leo! I wanted to chime in my support for this. I’d like to give this film a chance.

It’s great to see people taking the risk to make animated content for adults. There are lots of people who are conservative and will really shy away if you touch on any topics they aren’t comfortable with (loser character with side kick finds self worth).

The fact that this is a parody might be getting a little lost in the cultural differences for people, but it was pretty apparent to me. It’s a shame that Jerry blatantly labeled this as racist because most people won’t check out the gallery and will shy away from the film. I checked the gallery and didn’t see what would be found as offensive. There was ONE black child who was asking for money. And a black pimp. I thought the white cop designs were more pushed haha.

Hi
Well, in most of the comments I’ve read so far (except Leo’s) there’s a lack of information.
The main character, Boogie, appeared as a comic strip on many southamerican newspaper. Its author was an important cartoonist from Argentina, and he used acid and black humor, and its strips were full of political critics. Boogie is a hitman, a gun for hire, so he’s violent, sexist, chauvinist, and all the bad things you want to add. It’s a political critic to all the american intervenion on 3rd world countriess (like Panama’s invasion, Nicaraguas war with the contras, etc etc) and a parody of all american action heroes (like Dirty Harry). It’s not politically correct (fortunately, in southamerica we are no too much into it, and we can still laugh about our culture and social situation). And I hope in the movie he will not end turning into a good guy (like that crap movie of Judge Dredd). Btw, if you are familiar with Judge Dredd, maybe you can understand more Boogie. It’s not to be taken seriously, its not an apology for violence… its mostly fun, asides that sadly sometimes real people are that way. I’m not too found on the animation, cause the comicstrip was really well drawn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogie,_the_oily

Seems like ground already over-mined by the Dirty Harry and Deathwish movies.

Well, according to Wikipedia the Boogie character is a Dirty Harry “parody”, which would be parody of parody I guess. Maybe there’s a titillation aspect of seeing it in animation?

Countries without substantial minority populations seem to lift their notions very much from American film icons. See: the black “pimp” character in their gallery.

I think the spontaneity of the dialog jokes will be diminished by having to read them in subtitles.

The 2D-3D combo reminds me of Ralph Bakshi’s freely placing cel animation on photo backgrounds. Not that that was highly successful.

racist? misogynist? unappealing? funny how when other cultures do it, it’s offensive, but when it’s good ol’ seth mcfarlane, it’s ‘ironic’.

Terrible on almost every level.

We like the animation actually and don’t find the content too offensive, only because it seems obvious that it’s meant to poke fun at almost everything.

Funny moments:
Superhero steps in doo, doo or whatever that was.

Guy gets killed and thanks him.

You didn’t have to kill Gary. Who’s Gary?

It’s probably not fair to compare this to Sin City. That seemed much darker and way more real.

We’ll give this a chance.

I loved every single second of this thing and can’t wait to see it if it plays L.A.

We need more subversive cartoons.

Oh I don’t know…

It looks on every level to be a parody to me, and the graphic violence really doesn’t bother me at all. Of course, I enjoy and respect what Bakshi did along these lines in the ’70s (Coonskin being one of my favorites) as well as what other independents have also attempted along these lines.

I’d love to see it, but doubt it will make any kind of impact here in the USA.

Still, it’s encouraging to see anyone in this industry try to up the ante, so I wish it well.

Ugh, the Flash vector graphics and skew-resize-rotate effects make this unwatchable, parody or not.

I don’t like it.

I used to be a good friend of the creator of the strip, Roberto Fontanarrosa, who sadly died a couple of years ago after a long and wasting illness. The strip started in the early seventies and was a pisstake of “Dirty Harry” and the hyper-violent American movies of that period. Fontanarrosa was a VERY funny man and the comics of that time were hilarious. Times changed and F. went on to draw other, better comics, like Inodoro Pereyra, that remained his most important and most beloved character. Fontanarrosa also wrote short stories and plays, many of the short stories were adapted for television, always under his control and supervision. F. suffered for many years an illness similar to that of Stephen Hawkins and I don’t know if he was involved in the supervision of this movie. Doesn’t look like it because the bits I’ve seen seem to lack Fontanarrosa’s ironic wink that made the public see this character in a satyrical light.
Just for the record; the dialogue of the comics was written in the hybrid Central American Spanish used to dubb American TV shows.

It made me enthusiastic. I laughed.

Feels like 70s Bakshi to me.

Wish it was dubbed. Readin’ takes my attention away from the splatter. Just don’t use Patrick Warburton for Boogie. He’s all wore out.

It doesn’t look so bad to me. Of course it doesn’t seem to have very fluid or expensive animation but some of the jokes seem fine, especially the one about violence and food.

It can’t be a lot worse than El Superbeasto. I really wanted to like that movie but most of the stuff was just offensive for the sake of it, not funny at all.

That’s kind of the problem with these things. I do like political incorrectness but there should be gags and funny stuff and not just offensive things, boobs and violence. There are a lot of underground comic books that get it right but somehow it doesn’t usually work in cartoons.

This trailer is mixed, but it does seem to be a little funny. I’d watch it if I had the chance.

may not be the best piece of flash classical and 3d.
But its something.
I personally hated the style with shading and glares and red and blacks ,since the strip is got nice pastel tones and no shading almost.

and Yeah guys, do your research before saying Fontanarrosa copied Brock Samson.
besides…how many tough american guys have you NOT seen sporting a Curly blonde Mullet!

Distasteful and unappealing. It’s one thing to be violent, but at least make it interesting. It doesn’t achieve that at all in the trailer, more turned off than engaged with what’s going on. I think what would be the problem is that there’s no engagement with the characters, a guy just soullessly killing characters at will. Dark but with no room for embracing.

As to the one who mentioned about Seth MacFarlane in comparison, Seth makes his work funny and satirical. Not to mention he already built his characters to where audiences have already embraced them and their violent nature. This, however, has not.

Wow. Just..wow. Now that’s old-school racism right there folks

In no way this film is racist… This character, by Roberto Fontanarrosa was originally created during the worst days of the dictatorship for a magazine called “Humor Registrado” that managed to confront the status quo of the times… being frequently censored as well (I vividly remember one time when, on television by a decision of one of the dictators, it was announced one that an edition had to pulled out of the market).

Saw this at Annecy film festival this year. A pretty good and funny parody (I cannot understand how people don’t see the parody and think that it’s a racist or sexist cartoon ! People were laughing in the theater and I can guarantee you that they were not racists !)… A bit self-indulgent and boring near the end, though.

I did some research and I’ve been reading some of the comics I found online. Most of them were one page gags and yes, they are pretty funny. I don’t know how it will work in a complete feature though. The movie looks a little less smart than the comic, but I can’t judge without seeing it.

>>As to the one who mentioned about Seth MacFarlane in comparison, Seth makes his work funny and satirical. Not to mention he already built his characters to where audiences have already embraced them and their violent nature. This, however, has not.>>

Why not? Because it’s a movie and not a series? I’m sure people in Argentina know the character and they are aware that he’s a parody of racist and violent people. You haven’t even seen the movie. Here in Spain we have this life action movie called Torrente, which was a big success (the quality of the movie is another story, but it’s ok for some laughs). It’s about a racist and sexist cop and everybody knows it’s a parody. Using a racist or sexist character doesn’t mean you embrace racism or sexism, in fact it could be the perfect way to criticise it.

I don’t really think FG is that satirical , words like irony or satire usually imply there is some thought, message or intention that I don’t see in MacFarlane’s work, but that’s for another discussion.

It is a shame that a creation of the late Roberto Fontanarrosa, and probably himself, will be known more internationally through this thing.
I’m from Argentina, I know this character, that was borne as a Dirty Harry parody (hence his name Oily Boogie), and yes he is a sexist racist bastard. It was used by his creator as a device to point out these ideas on our society and, through humour, prevent us from them. The movie does not represent this. It was made as a Sin Citiesque attempt to get people in the movie theatres, and was stripped of any social comment and emphasised only violence. As many film adaptations do today, it destroyed the character.
It is another sad example of the mentality of most of the animation industry here, where a movie is seen only a s a way to make some money no matter what.

MH wrote:
“Looks like Frank Miller, Ralph Bakshi and the guys behind “The Venture Bros.” did a lot of drugs!”

This looks more like a video game than a feature film. Very similar to Bakshi’s films in that it goes from one gag to another wrapped around a very thin concept.

Look, if you draw the black characters as sambo caricatures, I’m going to see it as racist. The intent of the artists or filmmakers is immaterial. In the same way that I cannot see a swastika without thinking of the holocaust or look at the confederate flag without thinking of American slavery. Intellectually I can perhaps - PERHAPS - believe that the intent may not have been racist, but emotionally I simply cannot understand why anyone would draw a black character in sambo style unless they were being intentionally racist.

You think that’s “racist”? You better not read the Mexican “Memin Pinguin” comic books, or most anime/manga that has African people in it.

Seriously, seems like the U.S. is the only country overrun by politically-correctness.

Chris, they don’t view it as so offensively racist in the same way you probably don’t view Speedy Gonzales or Bumblebee man as being offensively racist.

I used to love the satirical dark humor of the Boogey strips, when they were printed at the back of the Proceso magazine here in Mexico —Proceso was a political magazine, so the satire of Fontanarrosa fitted quite nicely.

Having said that, I’m not too crazy about this project. Something definitely seems to be lost here. And, like Oscar Grillo, I dislike the “generic” Latin American accent they decided to use with the characters. The mixing 2D & 3D is also unappealing.

Nobody makes violent/sexist/racist movies anymore. But everybody makes PARODIES of such movies, which show their moral and aesthetic superiority by displaying industrial quantities of violence/sexism/racism. They cater to sensitive male film scholars who laugh at decapitations.

It’s easy to tell these artistic parodies from mere slime:
– “We’re mocking the genre conventions.”
– “Anyone who thinks this is a glorification of violence/sexism/racism simply hasn’t seen the whole movie.”
– “It’s based on a respected work of art.” (and we replaced the dull parts with parodies of explosions and softcore porn)
– “We’re not afraid to be politically incorrect.”

I figure the last really trashy movie was made sometime in the 1970s. Since then, everything that looked like trash was actually an insightful parody of that one flick.

You can tell the crew put a lot of effort into this, and from this trailer
I do think you can tell that the antics are SOOOO extreme that it MUST be a parody.

I think it’s hard though to have much appeal when it comes to something like this… it’s maybe a bit more self-indulgent, which isn’t always a bad thing, right? I agree with the above sentiment that printed material doesn’t always translate well to the screen, though.

But this film will find an audience, I’m sure. It does really smack of Bakshi! I also think more traditional animation rather than the puppety business may have helped it some, for some reason.

I beg to differ with Dagan and those saying the puppet animation used in this is a detriment. If SNL’s TV Funhouse and South Park has taught us anything, there’s something about more limited animation that really lends itself to satire. When something is so damn presentational instead of fluid and realistic, all that’s left is the comedy and the commentary. This movie will live and die by its parodying style, and the animation holds up well enough to simply support it.

Ah the comments and discussion about content aside, I just wanted to agree with Kate Burck’s point about blending the 3d and 2d animation.

When animated cartoons that use both together fail to blend correctly in terms of style, frame rate, or technique, it really makes what would look like an otherwise professional or semi-professional cartoon seem very cheap. This also seems especially inexcusable with all of the 2.5D techniques out there today available too effectively enhance your cartoon and not detract. Things have come a long way from Disney’s Atlantis.

This is no other thing that a movie- comic book that intends to criticize the extreme violence, racism, sexism and so on with a black humor touch. The comic book was made in the early seventy’s, so any seem of the character to brock samson, or any other character is mere concidence, the guys from adult swim might even took inspiration from boogie. This is an “american cliche action movie”, but through the eyes of a latin- american vision. The movie have some cultural references of movies such as sin city, hassard dukes, apocalyps now, and others.