Toon of the Month: Pineapple Calamari

Grief is not funny to the grievers, but I’m sure it can seem pretty absurd to onlookers.

After a close friend died, I inherited his leather jacket. I wore it often, imaging it was keeping him close to me, almost like his arms were protectively wrapped around me. I’m sure it seemed to those around me as touching and strange as it now does to me in memory.

Such stories abound, of course, but Pineapple Calamari, a painfully hilarious take on loss that’s partially inspired by Christopher Wood’s painting Zebra and Parachute, is among the most memorable. Kasia Nalewajka’s National Film and Television School grad film is how one imagines a collaboration between Hitchcock and Aardman Animation might shape out – dressing the creepy, fetishistic leanings of Vertigo in Creature Comforts-style clay animation.

As in Anomalisa, the use of stop-motion animation creates a distorted realism, a ‘kinda-lifelike’ vibe that suggests an emotionally damaged holding pattern, a denial triggered by despair so enveloping that reality is cast aside (by both the woman and the horse). Yet – again echoing Vertigo – reality is askew here even before the tragedy. There is an unreal, dream-like quality to the setting. Who are these women? What is their relationship? Why all the rum and frogs? Why is the chicken such an ass?

It’s such a surreal situation to start with that you’re left wondering, especially with the comic twist at the end, if what we’re viewing isn’t itself the product of a damaged mind. But whose? The grieving woman’s? Her late partner’s? The horse’s? The chicken’s?

Does it even matter?

The end result is a beautifully crafted, original and paradoxical work that takes us deep inside the paradoxes of the human unconscious, where reality and impossibility rest comfortably and logically together, like a horse in a dress.

Even though my friend has been gone for almost eight years now, once in a while I put on his coat, certain that I can feel his presence. Pain’s volume lowers with time, but never entirely goes quiet until we do.