100 Greatest Animated Shorts / Storytime / Terry Gilliam
UK / 1968
Storytime came in the same year as George Dunning’s Yellow Submarine, another hugely influential film that reflected the explosion of creativity going on in ‘Swinging London’. I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say that these films changed the path of animation, or at least opened up a whole new anarchic avenue. Storytime might not be as famous as Yellow Submarine but it led directly to Gilliam’s work on Monty Python’ s Flying Circus, which became a template for much lo-fi animation to come. It playfully subverted Disney’s approach, and therefore that of most mainstream animation’s, in the same way as Gilliam’s early fanzines had tried to subvert mainstream society with surrealist mockery.
After early years spent in Los Angeles (studying art and political Science) and New York (as assistant editor, writer, and cartoonist on Mad creator Harvey Kurtzman’s magazine Help!), Terry Gilliam arrived in London in 1967. Here he looked up the only Englishman he knew, the actor John Cleese. Cleese gave him the name of a BBC producer and soon Gilliam was employed on a TV comedy show entitled Do Not Adjust Your Set, where he worked as a sketch writer alongside Michael Palin, Eric Idle, and Terry Jones. When the producer Humphrey Barclay found out about Gilliam’s cartooning talent, he asked him to create some animation for the show. He later produced more cartoons to accompany various monologues and spin-offs, which were joined together to form the short film Storytime.
Probably influenced by Bob Godfrey’s similarly lo-fi, zany and anarchic Do It Yourself Cartoon Kit (1961), Storytime was also informed by Stan van der Beek’s Death Breath (1964), an absurdist art film Gilliam had seen in New York, featuring a cutout photo of Richard Nixon’s head, sliced in half horizontally so that the mouth could open right up and swallow a big foot. Faced with creating animation with little money or time, Gilliam came up with his trademark anarchic animation mixture of cutout photos, Victorian imagery, surreal machines, and bizarre but lovingly crafted illustrations.
The Christmas card sequence seen in Storytime, created for the Do Not Adjust Your Set Christmas special, is one of Gilliam’s finest and funniest moments and encapsulates the good-natured anarchy and mischievous inventiveness of his work.
When Palin, Idle, and Jones started to put together a new show with John Cleese and Graham Chapman, Gilliam was brought in to contribute with his animation, writing, and, sometimes, acting. Monty Python became an iconic television comedy of the 1960s and 1970s, and Gilliam’s anarchic animations are an integral part of its identity. His wild, inventive, and unconventional style proved influential on many future animators and directors, including lo-fi genius Michel Gondry and South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone. In later years, Gilliam took his particular aesthetic, attitude, and brand of gentle surrealism and widened its scope to become a visionary live-action movie director.