Director: Niven Wilson
Don’t Shoot the President is a series of horror-comedy sketches, tied together by an intersecting sea of fantastically vulgar imagery. Following a cast of crass characters and their apparently disparate threads into Hell itself, it feels like if Phil Tippet’s Mad God, if it had been directed by Terry Gilliam. To some people (probably a great many people) that will sound dreadful. But director Niven Wilson isn’t in the habit of making films to please everyone – or perhaps anyone – and more power to him for it.
Long-time readers will remember Wilson from his previous effort Eat the Rich – an unapologetically disgusting animated poem, which used gloriously crude consumerist caricatures to critique the gluttony-driven self-destruction of late capitalism. If, after seeing the film in IFL’s 2022 Halloween Horror Showcase, you were (ironically, considering the film’s message) left wanting more, Don’t Shoot the President won’t disappoint.
The opening scene follows a stand-up comedian – sporting a Cheshire Cat grin and gaunt, sunken cheeks – shuffles onto stage, to deliver the kind of pedestrian “You just can’t say that anymore” routines that dominate Netflix specials. But in this case, he seems to have stumbled on something he actually isn’t allowed to say – as his statement “Shoot the President. Why not?” prompts his microphone to fall limp in its stand, before it actively attempts to escape from the set.
The Looney Tunes-esque farce resolves when the comedian ingests the microphone as a drastic way of continuing the set without interruption. But when he does, he finds he is unable to get his message out at all; blurting “Do Knot Chute The Flesh Descent” in a mechanical voice, to cacophonous hoots of laughter from the audience. For the first time, the hideous veneered-smile of the comedian drops away – perhaps as he mulls over the price he has paid for fame. By making the apparatus of mainstream communication and ideology a part of himself, he has guaranteed himself a platform – but simultaneously made his having that platform utterly pointless, as he can no longer express the shocking things, he sought out a stage for in the first place.
Or maybe that’s me projecting? The thing about Don’t Shoot the President is that it is much less overt with what it wants you to think of it. While Eat the Rich used a narrative poem to make it clear what was going on, Wilson’s latest film seems happier to let us draw our own conclusions from the ensuing carnage – which plays fast and loose, quickly moving from one cryptic sequence to the next.
The comedian is followed by a creature with elongating extremities, watching the routine on television. While the creature wanders away from the television to feed its grumbling stomach, its ears stretch six metres across the apartment to stay with the vital messaging. As it tends to more of its needs, it crosses over its ears, arms and other limbs, tying itself in knots. Moving along, some fantastically odd imagery bridges the gaps between each mini-story – again bringing to mind the animations of Terry Gilliam in his Monty Python days – from a brain with wings escaping from the cracked cranium of one character, to an elevator falling from the sky to pummel another person through the floor, transferring us to a subterranean nightmare, where two geologists are grappling with a wall which is quite blatantly an anus.
It’s wonderful visual pulp, which will elicit shocked laughter from a few viewers – and queasy groans from others – but it does come with an important caveat. At just five minutes long, travelling at a rate of knots through each of these cartoon landscapes does not give us very long at all to try and find meaning in any of them. While Eat the Rich also did this – jumping between its rogue’s gallery of horrific capitalist cartoons very quickly – it lingered in a singular context where we could still find space to draw our own conclusions, and on top of that it had narrative guidance to help us do that more quickly. Here, there is probably not enough breathing space to get the most out of each vignette, unless you have access to a pause button, or can replay the film multiple times. Those seeing Don’t Shoot the President in theatres will not have that luxury. So, if Wilson does intend to head down a more experimental road in the future – and he is welcome to on this evidence – he does need to find a way to slow proceedings down a little, and let the audience digest some of the grisly details he is serving them.
At the same time, there is something strange going on with some of the animations visually, which doesn’t necessarily fit with the film’s broader style. When moving, things like hands and mouths have a habit of warping out of shape – which led me to believe Wilson might have used some form of AI to help expedite his animation process.
IFL rules do permit use of AI for animation, provided it is helping to move images solely provided by the filmmaker – but not from AI engines working on this basis regularly make non-consensual use of artists’ labour. Fortunately, it turns out the tool Wilson deployed here is not part of the latest AI craze at all, as it has been part of Adobe After Effects for more than a decade (though as AI ‘pioneers’ struggle to point to wins for the technology, this is the kind of tool which is now being re-branded as ‘AI’ by nature of it automating a process).
Timewarp is designed to allow users to turn normal footage into slow-motion, by generating frames that are half way between the existing ones. Wilson used it by drawing keyframes and some of the “in-betweens” and then allowing it to fill in the rest of the frames. As well as more quickly filling in gaps to produce a moving image, this produced the visual distortions which evidently interested Wilson, for a film in which so much of the things shown are about warped or distorted ways of seeing and living in the first place.
But for me at least, it doesn’t really pay off – not necessarily by any fault of Wilson’s, but rather because those distortions are reminiscent of so much AI crap now littering the web, and that in a film which isn’t overtly talking about that, it’s more of a distraction than an addition. At the same time, while the idea of ‘charm’ probably isn’t really something an artist who produces such grotesque imagery is concerned with, I feel like some of the charm of a jerkier animation style is always preferable to something smooth. It is presumably hellish to work that way (again, see Mad God) – but it also makes it feel that much more of a special experience to see the bloody suffering in it. And in a film like Don’t Shoot the President, that would feel kind of apt, I think.
Gripes aside, Don’t Shoot the President more than lives up to what I’ve come to hope for from this filmmaker, providing a horrific space acerbic ideological critique with its unabashedly abrasive imagery. I met up with Niven Wilson for a chat in Amsterdam late last year, and he mentioned that in the long-term he is planning to move into non-animated film. Personally, I can’t wait to see what fresh Hell he can unleash through a live-action horror – but on the basis of two very strong animated showings, I hope he doesn’t entirely abandon the world of animation. Painstaking though it may be, the medium lends itself to flights of fancy that (unless you have a ‘micro-budget’ of $1 million) aren’t always practical; and I get the feeling that he still has such sights to show us.