Microcinema DVDs - Monster Road - Collector's Edition

Monster Road is a feature length documentary exploring the wildly fantastic worlds of legendary animator Bruce Bickford. Tracing the origins of Bickford's iconoclastic worldview, the film journeys back to Bickford's childhood in a competitive household during the paranoia of the Cold War and examines his relationship with his father, George, who is facing the onset of Alzheimer's Disease. Monster Road premiered at the 2004 Slamdance Film Festival where it won "Best Documentary," eventually screening at over 85 festivals around the world, winning sixteen awards before premiering on Sundance Channel in June 2005.

Bruce Bickford's collaborations with rock musician Frank Zappa (Baby Snakes, Dub Room Special, The Amazing Mr. Bickford) in the 1970s made him an international cult figure. Three decades later, the sixty-one-year-old animator works alone in a basement studio near Seattle, producing films for no apparent audience. Enchanted forests, torture chambers, hamburgers that morph into mythical monsters, and epic battles between giants, fairies, and anachronistic historical figures populate just a small corner of Bickford's animated universe.

Bruce is the sole caretaker of his father George, a retired aerospace engineer of the Cold War era who faces the onset of Alzheimer's disease. George's talents for maximizing the space inside missiles are mirrored by his son's animations, which often contain dozens of matchstick-sized figures fighting battles on a set the size of a grapefruit. George's wondrous musings on the mysteries of the universe reveal a deep admiration for the implicit architect of such splendor while atheism prevents him from admitting the possibility of a God. Painfully piercing the fog of his memories, George considers the suffering of a life spent disengaged from his family and centered on the imperfections in those around him.

While the Bickfords lived a normal suburban life by all outward appearances, the brutality of Bruce's childhood drawings and subsequent animation hints at a darker underbelly. Questions are raised for which there are no easy answers. Monster Road untangles myriad personal, artistic, and philosophical strands from the Bickford's lives to illuminate an intricate web of influences that fuel Bruce's cinematic visions.

2009-03-25 Creative Loafing Atlanta
By Curt Holman

The documentary Monster Road reveals how animator Bruce Bickford creates his own little worlds. A cult figure for his collaborations with Frank Zappa, Bickford crafts his largely unseen, clay-based animated films from his basement studio near Seattle. His figures prove ceaselessly malleable: One sequence shows a human face morph into a werewolf, then a demon, then an ocean, and more.

Director Brett Ingram remains rigidly within the confines of Bickford’s regular routine, seldom straying from his workspace or the cramped kitchen of his father, George, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. Best Documentary winner of the 2004 Slamdance Film Festival, Monster Road focuses almost exclusively on the relationship between the two men and the origins of Bickford’s aesthetic. The 60-ish artist recounts his childhood living with his then distant, brooding father, two aggressive older brothers and bullying classmates. Cold War memories of an unfinished fallout shelter on nearby Monster Road also clearly fired his imagination.

Bickford describes his early fascination with “little guys” like Peter Pan who triumph over physically menacing villains. Such images recur throughout the snippets of his work shown in Monster Road. Occasionally, we see glimpses of creation and abundance, including bits of his film Prometheus' Garden, but more often the clips emphasize stabbings and other forms of violence in elaborate fantasies reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch.

Beyond the perceptions and memories of the elder Bickford and younger Bickford, context is nonexistent. Apart from a passing mention of his work with Zappa, you’d never learn about the 1987 video The Amazing Mr. Bickford, which features the animator’s work accompanied by the musician’s orchestral pieces.

Terry Zwigoff’s documentary Crumb presented more breadth in its portrayal of cult artist Robert Crumb’s craft, as well as his dysfunctional family background. Monster Road feels much more claustrophobic, which could imply that Bickford has become so disconnected from the rest of the world that he obsesses over increasingly narrow subject matter in his art. Bickford’s father, meanwhile, struggles to recall details from his past but ruminates over his failing body and the origins of creation. In Monster Road, art may not be the answer to George’s existential decline or Bruce’s childhood traumas, but one feels that it’s the only answer that the animator can offer.

2008-10-23 The Stranger
By Ross Simonini

Bruce Bickford lives in SeaTac down an isolated forest road. His living room is a warehouse of grocery bags stuffed with "voodoo masks" cut from dried leaves. Miniature "disco castles" and Twin Peaks dioramas are shoved into every corner. Armies of preserved clay figures hide in his garage. After working on Frank Zappa's wild, music-video-like films in the 1970s, Bickford has spent his time holed up, using these materials and figurines to create his abstract clay animations, each one a visual stream of consciousness. Bodies melt, spontaneously reproduce, and grow limbs. Faces turn into islands into caves into wolves into globes like a phantasmagorical meditation on the conservation of energy.

In 2003's Monster Road, a documentary about Bickford's life, the curious hermit ambles around his home in holey sweaters and paint-speckled pants, which is pretty much how I found him when I visited in June. In midconversation he would trail off, sit down at the trampoline he uses for a chair, and start working diligently on his comic book. He has never made regular income. In the '70s, after Bickford's military service, Zappa paid his room and board, and in exchange, the filmmaker produced long strands of swirling psychedelic imagery, including Baby Snakes and The Amazing Mr. Bickford. Barry Miles's recent Zappa biography calls Bickford one of "Zappa's pantheon of anthropological discoveries"—and indeed, his ambivalence toward contemporary culture gives his work the feel of outsider art.

Brett Ingram, director of Monster Road and owner of Bright Eye Pictures, also just released a DVD of Prometheus' Garden, a half-hour hallucination of multimedia animation that was completed (but not released) in 1987. It's the only film of Bickford's to reach the public since his Zappa work, and the whole thing serves as an illustration of Bickford's mastery of the painstaking, time-intensive process of replacement animation, where a series of figures are built to create the effect of growing or shrinking. On the commentary track, Bickford summarizes the plot: "[A guy] signals the girls to do something magical with that pot of weird material there, and when they dump it out some kind of an angel-spirit woman type thing appears." I couldn't have put it better.

At 68 years old, Bickford continues to work nonstop in his garage, still in thrall to the anti- establishment ideas of '60s counterculture. He gets his ideas from articles in 40-year-old issues of Mad and Esquire. He cites his greatest inspiration as "seeing the moonlight come through trees" and reluctantly points to Dali as an influence, but then immediately backtracks, saying, "I don't like what he does, but I like what he could have done."

More than making art, Bickford wants to tell stories. Stacked against one wall in his home are three boxes filled with 170-plus stories, each one a hanging folder stuffed with sketches, notes, clipping, and titles such as "The Mask of the Dead Brain" and "Terminal Velocity." A page chosen at random reveals the phrase "gore splatters on the UFO probe." These are hyped-up pulp stories, chock-full of horror, action, sci-fi, and mythological environments, and each one is a seed for Bickford's animation and comic books. "Some people just can't think. They'll steal anyone's ideas," Bickford complains. "I think you can make a story out of anything."

What Bickford really wants to do is adapt these ideas to the film, and not low-budget Zappa-esque cult films, but Hollywood blockbusters (specifically, James Cameron movies). Bickford wants to be relevant—and he should be. He still lives in the vine-covered home he grew up in, without the shrewd business mind to market himself out of there, but he holds a visual ingenuity comparable to, say, Michel Gondry's, and in the right circumstances, Bickford could appeal to the same audience.

Recently, Bickford has been coming out of hiding. Last summer, in one of the rare public displays of his art, he showed his dioramalike microenvironments at Christoff Gallery in Georgetown, and all the while, sat onstage and animated. This summer, in addition to the DVD release of Prometheus' Garden, Northwest Film Forum is hosting Cartune Xprez, a "traveling road show of animated videos" that includes The Comic That Frenches Your Mind, one of Bickford's stunning line animations. Peter Burr, the program's curator, thinks of the work in a high-art context, complimenting Bickford's ability to conjoin the "postmodern tradition of deconstruction of historical iconography" and "the style and ethos of folk art."

Hopefully, the last five years of Bickford archive excavation are only the beginning. Hundreds of film snippets, clay bodies, and comic books still sit in his mouse-infested garage, waiting to be completed. Bickford spots one of them on a table. "That one over there is a woman," he says. "I just haven't put the tits on her yet."

2008-09-09 videolibrarian.com
By M. Johanson

Even in the cultish world of clay animation, Bruce Bickford stands out as an offbeat filmmaker. His collaborations with Frank Zappa in the 1970s—such as the 1979 concert film Baby Snakes, among other projects—made him a revered alternative culture figure. Today, the sixtysomething Bickham continues to make disturbing movies (that hardly anyone ever sees) in his basement. Documentarian Brett Ingram’s labor-of-love portrait takes viewers into Bickford’s insular world, where he lives seemingly cut off from everyone except his father, George—who is descending into the haze of Alzheimer’s—and his own deep-seated neuroses. Drawing on home movies, childhood sketches, interviews, and clips from Bickford’s recent work, Ingram explores Bickford’s psychological monsters, illuminating the mind of an artist who produces meticulously animated battle scenes, unsettling metamorphoses of humans changing into creatures or being consumed, strange manipulations of scale that reduce men to dwarves or render them as giants, and other disquieting imagery. A poignant but never pitying profile, this intriguing study of the driving force behind an artist’s work has been recognized with a slew of festival awards, including Best Documentary Jury Prize at Slamdance in 2004. DVD extras include rare samples of Bickford’s animation, deleted scenes, and more. Recommended. [Note: Bickford’s half-hour-shy 1988 film Prometheus’ Garden is also newly available at the same price.]

2008-08-28 Curled Up With A Good DVD
By Eric Renshaw

Monster Road examines the life and methods of animator Bruce Bickford, whose morphing flow-of-consciousness animation interludes graced Frank Zappa's concert film Baby Snakes . He lives in a house near Seattle he inherited from his mother, built by his father, now filled with the parts used in the making of his animated films, past and future. He enjoys his herbal life-extending concoction while wearing a smoking jacket on the roof of his home, which boasts a beautiful view. He tries to stay active and fit, as this may well be the answer to a longer life.

Bruce's father, George, suffers Alzheimer's but still lives on his own and seems pretty lucid.* George decorates the walls of his kitchen with pictures clipped from magazines, labeling them with amusing captions. It seems as though George is a bit of an artist himself, though I don't think he'd say so himself. He waxes philosophical throughout his portions, seeming to flit between atheism and theism; he wonders at one point who made a rainbow.

Through Monster Road , Bickford's vision becomes more clear. His philosophies and his narrative are explained a bit better than he could do himself, making this an excellent companion piece to any of his animations - and if you're a fan of animation, it's a must.

The extra features include deleted scenes which are themselves excellent, not just throw-aways. There is extra animation by Bruce and 15 MP3s of soundtrack music by Shark Quest.