Angry Kid - Season One and Two DVD Collection

People have always experimented with animation, pushing the boundaries of what they can do with the medium. Early animators drew the background in every frame before the acetate cel was discovered. European animators have used insects, household appliances and even meat to create their point. Hand drawn cels have since given way to digital scanning and compositing and the CG advance hardly needs be discussed. Then we have stuff like Angry Kid, an experiment in animating actual human beings (sort of). This isn’t exactly a new thing; the Bolex Brothers have tried it before in films like Tom Thumb. Where that was quite creepy and definitely dark, Angry Kid is more mainstream in its appeal.

Well, sort of. Here we have a human being wearing a foam wig and mask with the animators changing the mask to animate speech and movement whilst our human being (a patient Clayton Saunders) makes the necessary frame by frame movements (the animation process is called pixellation for some reason). The bits aren’t long, in fact each short vignette takes around a minute and is designed to be filler material for TV. Not kid’s TV, mind you. This gets pretty vulgar, even if the jokes are quite puerile.

"What’s a buttplug?"

Angry Kid is an anorak wearing teenager who explores his world in much the manner most kids do. He isn’t a popular kid, whether by fault or design, spending a lot of time with himself or his younger sister. He’s not exactly ‘angry’ either. More like an annoying weirdo – you know, that odd kid who tortured animals or drew carnage-filled pictures at school. And not that there’s really anything wrong with the odd kid; I kinda feel I was one a little bit, but this kid certainly spends way too much time alone.

Whether he’s exploring the contents of his nose or brushing his teeth with his mother’s vibrator, Angry Kid is quite repugnant. He annoys his father, vomits regularly, farts and is generally unsociable. If this sounds interesting, as I thought it did, it isn’t really. The humour is very base level and isn’t as polished as it could be in the scripting department. Each brief piece doesn’t exactly finish in a nice round way, but whether that’s deliberate (to continue the viewer’s annoyance) I don’t know.

I found it a bit disappointing as far as scripting goes, though the animation was certainly unique and well executed. When you have a series written, voiced and directed by the same guy, there's really no one there to tell him it's crap. If you enjoy animation for the sole joy of watching animation, then there’s plenty here for you. However, if you enjoy a full experience that includes a decent script and character voices, you may be in the wrong review…

This looks pretty good for TV made in 1999 and again in 2002. Each episode starts with the same annoying riff and short credit sequence and when 25 episodes come to no more than 36 minutes, they do feel like padding (as do the closing credits). The second season suffers the same fate, though this one runs for just over 31 minutes. Everything else looks fine, save for some outdoor shooting that contains some heavy-duty grain at times. And made for English TV, this comes in the regular TV aspect of 4:3.

Annoying musical riffs aside, the music here is also annoyingly metallic. It does set the feeling well for the Angry Kid’s unseen anger while still appearing cartoonish at times. There isn’t a lot of it except for the credit sequences anyway, but it sounds okay. The audio is presented in Dolby Digital stereo of course, the standard for TV production, and it does the job just fine here. Dialogue is a little annoying with some local vernacular that may confuse some, but it is synched very well.

There are a couple here, but they don’t really add much value to this disc.

Inside Angry Kid: The Making Of is a 7:20 featurette that goes behind the scenes to see the animators sitting around working and as well as doing nothing. Some info here for the diehards, but nothing exemplary.

Reports number two and are the School Report and Police Report of two pages each documenting the notoriety Angry Kid has achieved in his fictional world. Attempts at humour don’t really translate well and these are little more than filler material.

A montage runs for 1:06. This feels like a trailer for the show and features some of Angry’s adventures all spliced together into a composite waste of time.

Finally the Director’s Cut features a 1:14 bit that isn’t really any different but for a stupid and childish credit sequence full of speeding in-jokes and dumb one-liners. Another garish waste of time.

And that’s all, folks. Not much, is there?

I found Angry Kid more irritating than funny and even the pretty cool animation and digital compositing couldn’t save what is essentially a pretty lacklustre effort coming out of Aardman studios (those folks responsible for some of the most brilliant stop motion films ever devised). This is disappointing, but there are no doubt quite a few folks out there who couldn’t care about the animation or anything because there’s snot and poo jokes throughout. To these I say knock your puerile selves out and go for it, but for everyone else, this isn’t worth the time.