Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #118 Animalympics
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career and am now in the process of writing about every episode of Batman Beyond for the same insanely generous patron.
I also recently began an even more screamingly essential deep dive into the complete filmography of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen.
I should probably also point out that while I prefer Patreon, because the ongoing income it provides allows this site to survive you can also send me one hundred or seventy-five dollars via Paypal at nathanrabin@sbcglobal.net if you’d like to select a movie for this column without having to deal with the Patreon system.
That’s how one kind patron chose to pay for 1980’s Animalypics, a movie I have fond if fuzzy memories of digging as a child when my dad brought it home from the video store sometime in the early 1980s under the sound logic that his small children would enjoy a cartoon involving funny animals, sports and the Olympics.
The Olympics seemed infinitely bigger and more important when I was a child. The stakes then couldn’t be higher. It was capitalism versus communism. God’s own United States versus the glowering, Godless Bolsheviks of The Soviet Union. Good versus evil. Jesus versus Josef Stalin. The Red, White and Blue versus the hammer and sickle.
The Olympics, in other words, were about the Cold War. As a child, they were about the Cold War first and athletic competition a distant second. Now, sadly, they’re just about sports. Stupid, boring sports. The Olympics are about who the world’s best pole vaulter is, not feverish competition between Marxist-Leninism and free market capitalism.
In its own irreverent way, Animalympics captures some of the genuine awe that I felt watching my first Olympics in 1984, when the United States whipped the rest of the world like a misbehaving mule because the Soviet Union was boycotting in retribution for The U.S boycotting the 1980 Olympics in protest of the invasion of Afghanistan.
As an idea and an ideal, there’s something beautiful about the Olympics, something majestic and eternal in the notion of the greatest athletes in the world coming together in the spirit of competition and international brotherhood.
Even if you do not care about the individual events, the inherent drama of the Olympics has a way of sucking you in, especially if you are a child.
Animalympics was consequently a breezy trip down memory lane in myriad ways. But it also represents a fascinating sub-genre I have explored extensively in this column: cult 1980s kid’s cartoons that are too dark, adult and sexual to be appropriate for kids but just dark, adult and sexual enough for nostalgic grown-ups looking to re-explore some of the kinkier nooks and crannies of their childhood.
The directorial debut of Tron director Steven Lisberger rivals Zootopia and Bojack Horseman in its extraordinary world-building, in its ability to create a vividly realized universe of total anthropomorphism that completely and compellingly recreates our world with animals instead of human beings.
Animalympics resembles Zootopia in being absurdly furry-friendly as well. The movie was an early gift to the furry community that brazenly and shamelessly sexualizes its humanoid animal characters for the erotic enjoyment of the folks in the audiences who dig that kind of thing.
I spent seventy eight enjoyable, nostalgic, sometimes disturbingly erotic minutes watching Animalympics and hoping, to paraphrase the famous Community line, that it would not awaken anything in me.
Animalympics is unrated but I’m guessing the MPAA would probably give it a PG for “Sexy-Ass Animals You’re Definitely Going to Want to Fuck.”
I’m referring specifically to the movie’s two preeminent furry icons, Kit Mambo, a slinky lioness prone to skimpy running shorts and her competitor turned soulmate Rene Fromage.
Animalympics doesn’t just shoot Mambo from behind at one point to REALLY give all the furries in the audience a good long look at her ass; this talking animal character’s sexual desirability is further established through the dialogue when sportscasters refer to the “shapely form of Kit Mambo.”
The furry-friendly stoner movie for children who love sports chronicles the action and excitement of the very first Olympics for animals.
But Animalympics has more to offer kinky adults in the audience than sexual gratification. The affable kids film has fun sight gags and fun wordplay for children and all manner of pop culture references for their grandparents, like Ed Sullivan, Australian super-producer Roger Stigwood and, most audaciously, Ingmar Bergman and his famously icy masterwork The Seventh Seal.
The incongruously adult references extend to making many of the film’s sportscasters and athletes parodies of famous politicians like Henry Kissinger and journalists like Barbara Walters and Howard Cosell.
Gilda Radner gives the film’s Barbara Walters figure, a stork named Barbara Warbler, the same exaggerated lisp as her Walters impersonation on Saturday Night Live.
Not to be outdone, Billy Crystal gets to recycle his Howard Cosell and Muhammad Ali impersonations here, with the caveat that in this world, Cosell is a literal as well as figurative turkey and Ali is a boxing kangaroo with a gift of gab named Joey Gongolong.
Animalympics has an anarchic, subversive streak redolent of old Warner Brothers cartoons but Steven Lisberger and his hungry, over-achieving animators, who include a very young Brad Bird, who was presumably hired for his talent and not just his last name, are also refreshingly willing to forego laughs in favor of both balletic beauty and trippy abstraction.
The scrappy animated film barely passes the seventy-five minute mark but it nevertheless finds time and space for bravura set-pieces where the animal kingdom joins together at a kaleidoscopic disco to blow off some steam and an even druggier sequence that imagines the crazy, spectacular inner world a diver experiences when he’s in the zone.
The Olympics are, on some level, about beauty, about grace, about the transcendent spectacle of the human body at its peak form squaring off against other similarly perfect bodies with the whole world watching. Animalympics is concerned with the non-human body at its most beautiful, most ridiculous, or most simultaneously beautiful and ridiculous.
This clever, unexpectedly sweet little movie embodies the handmade, artisanal charm of conventional animation, the way it reflects the personalities and minds of all the worker bees who brings these ideas and images to life. It’s a labor of love full of wonderful details as well as a reminder of all that was lost in the rush to embrace CGI and 3-D animation that all too often feels soulless and cold, the work of machines rather than human beings.
I’m grateful I have an excuse to watch weird, wonderful, kinda pervy movies like Animalympics. At some point I will have watched every weird, inappropriately adult, bizarrely sexual kids movie from the 1980s for this column and it will make feel both happy and sad.
I’ll feel a sense of accomplishment at having made my way through an entire fascinating sub-genre but I’ll also be a little bummed that there’s no more screamingly insane 80s kids films for me to watch and write about for y’all.
Hopefully I can then start writing about wildly inappropriate kids movies from the 1990s for this column, and begin the heady, weirdly satisfying process all over again.
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