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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.
| Catalog Number: MC-856 |
Type: Feature |
Genre: Documentary |
| Copyright: 2005 |
Length: 80 minutes |
Format:
DVD Region: 0 (All) |
| TV System: NTSC |
ISBN: |
UPC: 718122891009 |
| Label: Bright Eye Pictures |
Notes: DVD Extras: 45 minutes of video extras including: eight deleted scenes and seven previously unrele
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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.
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