Mel Brooks - The Critic (1963)

The Critic is a 1963 short animation by director/producer Ernest Pintoff and creator/narrator Mel Brooks, that won an Academy Award for Short Subjects (Cartoons) in 1964. The film was reportedly inspired by an actual incident. In Spring, 1962 Mel Brooks attended a movie theater, which among other films screened an animated short by Norman McLaren. It featured surrealistic, abstract imagery. During the screening of this short, Brooks listened to another audience member “mumbling to himself“. He was an old immigrant man who was voicing his disappointment at the lack of a plot. Brooks was inspired to make a film out of this experience. Brooks contacted Ernest Pintoff, who had experience producing animated works such as Flebus. They agreed to create a short film, and Brooks had two requests for his new partner. The visuals of the film had to be fashioned in a style similar to that of McLaren, and Brooks himself would have no specific warning of the content. He intended to improvise his monologue.[1] Pintoff and animator Bob Heath completed the visuals as agreed, then Brooks watched the result and improvised his monologue. He used a Russian Jewish accent and attempted to find lines appropriate for an old man “trying to find a plot in this maze of abstractions.“ Henry Jenkins points that the comments themselves belong to a recognizable narrative mode, the stream of consciousness. Simple, abstract, geometric shapes move and morph on the screen to what sounds like harpsichord music. The voice of an audience member, who claims to be 71, complains throughout most the film despite being told repeatedly by other audience members to keep quiet. The images on screen feature geometric patterns. The “cranky and clueless“ old man is trying to make sense of them, and describes what he sees at various points. For example a squiggle, a fence, a cockroach. The old man finds that certain images remind him of his biology classes, from when he was a boy back in Russia. When two abstract shapes approach each other and unite, the old man sees it as a mating sequence. “...They like each other. Sure. Lookit da sparks. Two things in love!... Could dis be the sex life of two things?“ When the scene shifts from the “mating“ to other abstract images, the old man gets bored. He proclaims the images must be symbolism, then adds that they are symbolism of junk. He eventually concludes that some of the images, depicting lips, are “dirty“, obscene. He admits at some point that he was looking for “a hot French picture“, which he hoped would involve nudity. The implication is that the old man is in the wrong movie theater, probably one screening art films. He also wonders why the creator of the film wasted his time with this. He points that this creator could instead do something meaningful, like driving a truck, or do something constructive, like working in shoemaking.