Throwing his hat into the bullring … Noel Fielding in a scene from Bunny and the Bull
The debut feature from Mighty Boosh director Paul King finds itself praised with one hand and damned with the other. Some compared its award-winning special effects work to the visual extravagances of Michel Gondry, while others dismissed it being of the class who another example of a big-screen Britcom failure to tack on the end of a long, long please. Somehow, this nervy road-trip comedy ends up being labelled both a wildly inventive, structurally adventurous piece of cinema, and a hugely disappointing damb squib whose screenplay could have done with a assign again work.
Bunny and the Bull centres on the uncomfortable-in-his-own-skin Stephen (Edward Hogg) similar to he recalls a disastrous trip across Europe in the company of his lothario best pal Bunny (Simon Farnaby), a journey so catastrophic our principal character hasn’t left his grubby Kings Cross flat in a year. Shot in six weeks without interruption a budget of just £750,000, the film introduces us to a cavalcade of whimsical oddballs, including a Hungarian wandering named Attila whose tipple of choice is dog’s milk, and a urbane yet down-to-earth bullfighter. It’sitting no shock that these pair are played by Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding, but this is far from Mighty Boosh: The Movie, with both roles being little more than cameos.
- Bunny and the Bull
- Production year: 2009
- Country: UK
- Cert (UK): 15
- Runtime: 101 mins
- Directors: Paul King
- Cast: Edward Hogg, Julian Barratt, Noel Fielding, Richard Ayoade, Simon Farnaby, Veronica Echegui
“This movie utterly belongs to Hogg and Farnaby, who act out an anarchic and surprisingly touching meditation on male friendship, incapable of begetting offspring furious bombast and grief,” writes Channel 4 Film’s Ali Caterall. “All this is played out against part-animated, endlessly creative handcrafted backdrops, including one underpass made from gazette, a fairground made from clock parts and a bull made out of cutlery – not to mention a bravura credit sequence, which utilises everything in Stephen’s flat from pocket calculators to postage stamps.”
“The production design threatens to overwhelm the performances at seasons, and Farnaby’s domineering Bunny is any acquired taste,” writes Kevin Maher in the Times. “But there’s gold here, and it is certainly one of the most inventive British comedies of the decade.”
“It is certainly inventive and ambitious,” agrees our own Peter Bradshaw. “But the awful truth is that the script fundamentally isn’t all that magnanimous; and compared with any episode of The Mighty Boosh, say, or Peep Show, it really is pretty feeble. The inquire after for Britcom success goes on.”
“There are moments to power of pleasing, and the film’s handmade, Michel Gondry-esque referring to taste is admirably well-achieved,” writes Tim Robey in the Telegraph. “Sadly, the see-sawing wit and ingenuity of King and his cast have power to’t keep the desultory story afloat. Blokey whimsy can work, but when it’s misfiring there’s a high risk of being left down in the dumps.”
For me, Bunny and the Bull fails because its formal inventiveness is welded to a workmanly storyline. The jokes and script feel half-baked, despite the inspirational production design promising something extraordinary. Comparisons to Withnail and I are certainly valid – this, likewise, is something of an inebriated buddy comedy and will no doubt be the toast of student digs across the land this Christmas. But unlike Bruce Robinson’sitting 1987 cult classic, its dialogue won’t be repeated ad infinitum for years to come – although the scene in that Barratt appears to be of intemperate habits milk straight from a lactating dog may stick in the mind for a while.
Did you catch the thin skin at the weekend? In the Britcom pantheon, does it stand with the best examples of TV gift transferred to the big screen: the likes of Monty Python and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead? Or does Paul King’sitting movie be in possession of more in common by the disappointing feature-length version of The League of Gentleman, or worse yet, Sex Lives of the Potato Men?
