Several pieces of Frank Zappa's music are set against clay animation by Bruce Bickford.
We enter Bruce Bickford's studio in Santa Monica, California; it's 1978. Various technicians are at work; drawers upon drawers are full of figurines. Bickford says a few things, and then, with Zappa's symphonic music on the soundtrack, we're taken into various Bickford creations. Knife-wielding Africans fight rifle-toting Whites. A drawing of a toilet fills the screen, various foods emerge from it, and they change shapes swiftly into images of animals and things. In claymation, three everymen move through landscapes of danger and conflict. Moments of the every day change quickly into grotesque images. Little holds its shape for more than a moment.—<[email protected]>
Zappa has always been interested in comic and animation, collaborating on the visuals of his albums and concerts with various artists. Among them, the best-known is Bruce Bickford, with whom Frank planned at some point to make a movie. Bickford's own dispersion (see Baby Snakes) made completion impossible, but Zappa brought together some finished scenes in this medium-length feature. Bickford's maze-like, surreal world he still lives and works in a Seattle cellar- explodes in these nightmarish images patiently elaborated with plasticine and the stop-motion technique.
