Along with the climate change-induced spring bloom, Easter is early this year. And like a horde of putrid crocuses, the idiots claiming “Easter eggs don’t even say Easter on them anymore” have surfaced to bleat out their bizarre and inaccurate assertions of political correctness gone mad. In their honour, I thought I’d write something to remind everyone about the reason for the season. Jesus. Rampant capitalism. The Easter Bunny.
For as long as I can remember, I have been haunted by images of a pair of rabbits being swallowed whole by a shark – before belting out Please Release Me to encourage the predator to cry-puke them out of its stomach. When I asked my parents about this image, so clearly hewn into my brain, they insisted they had no memory of it – and I may have made it up. But after years of searching, that wonderful treasure-trove that is YouTube piracy finally gave me an answer.
I have been remembering an image from Will Vinton’s Claymation Easter, released in 1992. After someone had the strange inclination to rip it from a just-about-surviving VHS copy and plonk it on the internet, I was finally able to revisit this strange little comedy – and what I found was broadly a pleasant surprise in terms of both the film, and its unexpectedly important legacy.
After a slightly contrived opening sequence – which possibly relies on pre-existing knowledge of its long-forgotten characters that I did not have then, or now – the short film rips by in less than 25 minutes. In that time, it repeatedly inflicts hideous physical punishments on a cast of three-dimensional talking animals, ridicules US shrink-culture, and cracks off a joke about onanism. It’s little wonder I was so bemused by the film when I first watched it three decades ago – but I also have to admit I laughed harder at the misadventures of Wilshire Pig than at many other films I’ve watched as an adult.
Charming cynicism
Wilshire is an Animal Farm style pig, who has taken over a human institution of exploitation – an animal testing facility – and is attempting to use it to enrich himself. But when his latest test sees the subject – another pig – mauled by a shark, Wilshire exclaims in frustration “this was supposed to be my ticket out of this dive”, and begins looking for an alternative line of work.
Opportunity knocks when listening to talk radio later that night. Wilshire hears the host – Dr Spike Rabbit – in conversation with the one and only Easter Bunny, a comedically ‘innocent’ character whose apparent good-heartedness might very easily be mistaken for stupidity. According to EB, he was recently offered a $5 million contract to promote a famous brand of tennis shoes – and turned it down.
With an idea forming, Wilshire phones into the station to ask how someone might get the job if “something were to happen” to the incumbent Easter Bunny. EB happily obliges, explaining that while he is sure nothing will happen to him, if it did “they” (apparently meaning all the other rabbits in the world), would just have to choose a new one. After a little further reading, Wilshire discovers he would need to win a race – which he underestimates the difficulty of, to comic effect – and decides this will be his ticket to the good life.
The early part of the plan is easy: the Easter Bunny is a prime rube. Posing as a door-to-door vacuum sales person, Wilshire soon captures his target with a particularly powerful hoover. But learning to be a ‘rabbit’ in order to enter the upcoming selection process is more of a challenge. Turning to Dr Spike for help as a “rabbit trapped in a pig’s body”, Wilshire soon learns of the difficulty of raiding a farmer’s vegetable patch while a Hector the Bulldog-type is on guard duty – and simply crossing the road (playing on the adult knowledge of the many pancaked rabbits we see on our daily commute).
The start of this sequence is one area which has probably not aged well. While a bad-faith actor exploiting identity politics to accrue power and money could be seen as taking aim at the likes of Rachel Dolezal or the CIA; we’re in Al Murray – The Pub Landlord territory, where even if this is a subtle act of satire, it’s vague enough that bigots could just as easily enjoy this as another cheap joke at the expense of the trans community.
It’s not entirely clear where the jokes are for younger audiences, either – and considering this is still clearly marketed as a kid’s show, that is at least a slight issue. Beyond the Looney Tunes-inspired slapstick set-pieces (holding up a sign that reads “Help” while being battered by a bulldog; being hit so hard by a passing truck that your skeleton climbs out of your skin; using dynamite to hatch an Easter egg) there isn’t much identifiable humour for anyone under the age of 20.
Honestly, that might be enough to justify a watch when looking to shut the kids up this Easter. While they laugh at the silly looking pig getting mowed down by a passing juggernaut, you might also have a sly laugh when he asks an egg to hatch early, and the inner chick – with the voice of a New York cabbie – barks “leave me alone, I’m incubating!” You might enjoy the moments of air-headed inanity from the Easter Bunny – who, like The Meep, seems to be overtly satirising the irritation that cute family characters actually bring out in adults – from being surprised at a news cast that “the Easter Bunny has been kidnapped” to excitedly announcing the approach of a “dolphin” when noticing an ominous fin in the water below him (right before the previously mentioned scene that lingered on with me for 30 years).
Down the rabbit hole
Like the Looney Tunes era it takes inspiration from, Will Vinton’s Claymation Easter is what you might call utilitarian with its storytelling – cutting back on all but the most essential details to allow maximum room for pratfalls or wise-cracking. But even so, it’s also interesting to see how it still manages to personify a brand of storytelling, primarily aimed at kids but including dark or adult content targeted at their parents. Finally coming to the ‘rabbit hole’ mentioned in my title, it is this formula which has been essential for Vinton’s stop-motion successors to still eke out an existence in an industry that has broadly moved in a different direction in the US.
Will Vinton Studios has a fascinating legacy to that end. Vinton, who passed away in 2018, won an Oscar for Best Animated Short with 1975’s Closed Mondays – and his career after put down the foundations that would see claymation survive into the modern era, in spite of the early-2000s boom in CGI. Exemplifying that, while A Claymation Easter picked up an Emmy itself, it also became an important footnote in the career of director Mark Gustafson (who sadly passed away this February) – who went on to win an Oscar of his own for co-directing the brilliant stop-motion movie Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.
And while things did not end happily for Vinton at his own studio – losing control of the company to investor and Nike co-founder Phil Knight (whose son Travis worked at the studio as an animator) in 2002 – the legacy of those earlier films would inform what the surviving studio would do later. Rebranded as Laika in 2005, the studio recruited Henry Selick (of The Nightmare Before Christmas fame), and began making successful use of that distinctive adult-films-for-kids formula in claymation, while managing to apply it to feature run-times. This resulted in films like Coraline, ParaNorman, and Missing Link. Even as the remains of Vinton’s work might now be mostly confined to haunted, crackling images lifted from ageing VHS, none of the cinematic achievements of Laika would have occurred, were it not for the bizarre, half-remembered worlds of films like Claymation Easter.