"Buddy" review — Children’s TV riff is a lurid nightmare
“Here’s the knife. It’s nice to share!”
If you were anything like me, as a child of the 00s and 2010s, you may remember singing the dark, violent, and sadistic parody of the “I Love You” song from the children’s television program Barney & Friends. “Love” was replaced with “hate,” with the promise to finally, permanently do away with the purple dinosaur. “With a great big hug and a kiss from me to you” was replaced with the words “With a baseball bat and a 4x4,” exploring how these children were going to perform their vile deed. It was an endless source of amusement, especially when the lyrics were compared to the other variations of the same violent delights that popped up at other schools, as no one sang the same methods of murder. There was no greater joy than snickering at the violent destruction of childhood icons. An iconoclastic attitude towards Treehouse television programming, if you will. Perhaps we can view this as the adolescent mind forcefully shedding off the skin of childhood, striking out a claim for itself in an increasingly dark and adult world, especially in the age of the nascent internet. And, perhaps, I haven’t quite gotten over it.
Casper Kelly’s Buddy is, effectively, the spiritual successor to the sing-song murder of the purple dinosaur. Except, here, it’s an orange unicorn who’s here to perform the violence. Buddy is about a Barney-esque television show, and the opening minutes of the film show several condensed episodes, complete with talking inanimate objects, a studio set, songs, and a whole lot of “love.” Of course, this world’s friendly fluffy monster also has some control-freak impulses, murderous impulses, and the ability to warp reality itself, both within the world of the show and the real world. Kelly’s haunting imagined series — called It’s Buddy! in the world of the film — is ripe for some nightmarish imagination, as the artifices of the studio setting make the whole film pulse with anxious confinement. With its pitch-perfect colour grading, framing, and musical pieces, the film is a stunning recreation of late 1990s children’s programming, which makes its central premise all the more disturbing. This thing that should be safe and friendly is made perverse. He also blends liberal amounts of shock comedy impulses, adding to the eeriness. Although with these aesthetic choices, Kelly isn’t merely allowing for unbridled carnage, as I had once contended myself with. He’s also crafting a rather deft narrative about child abuse and neglect, anchoring the film in a strong emotional core. Buddy has kept me buzzing long after the TV was finally shut off.
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| Photo via Roadside Attractions. |
Inside the world of It’s Buddy!, the show follows a group of child protagonists as they learn to navigate social-emotional challenges, helped by the lovable talking unicorn. The ensemble is filled out by a mailman, a nurse, an anthropomorphic rabbit, and other talking household objects (a mailbox, couch, clock, and backpack are all included). But when one of the children on the show expresses his dislike of Buddy’s dance party activity, an opinion on which he will not budge, the tangerine unicorn starts to get more than a little agitated. Soon, the other children begin to suspect that Buddy isn’t being entirely honest about their friend’s recent disappearance and that something more nefarious might be going on. Meanwhile, in the real world, Grace, a suburban mother of two boys played by Cristin Milioti (the Emmy-winning actress from HBO’s The Penguin), starts to succumb to a mean streak of paranoia and fear, brought on by the certain feeling that there is something deeply, but unknowably, wrong about her life. Her husband (played by Topher Grace) isn’t entirely sure what to make of her increasingly erratic behaviour, especially after Grace invites a psychic into their house to hunt for evil spirits. At the end of her rope, Grace is eventually brought over to the world of It’s Buddy! when the titular creature suddenly appears on her TV, inviting her further in.
With Buddy being his debut theatrical feature, director and co-writer Casper Kelly has a filmography filled with extensive credits at Adult Swim, including credits on Archer, Harvey Birdman, and his infamous (and brilliant) short “Too Many Cooks.” For those who’ve seen it, it’s “Too Many Cooks” that feels like the most obvious connective tissue to the aesthetic playground of Buddy. Like “Cooks,” which horrorifies a stereotypical 1980s family sitcom intro, Buddy does the same sort of “lost television series” riff, just extended to a theatrical runtime. Shocking, often laugh-inducing violence becomes the film’s lifeblood. Kelly pulls off a stunning evocation of the very specific aesthetics of Treehouse-inspired live-action programming, with all of the lurid colours, flat lighting, early digital image imperfections, and the distinctive 1.33:1 television aspect ratio, before obliterating its aesthetic over and over again as it leaps between levels of reality. Lighting and design philosophies change on a whim as the characters unravel the secrets hiding in plain sight around Buddy’s clubhouse. Kelly employs some particularly memorable shifting aspect ratios — 1.33 to 2.39 to 1.78 and back again — to create some of the film’s best visual flourishes. The film is far from just an aimless ultraviolent parody. Kelly packs so much care and intention into each frame, making the film a love letter as much as it is parody, and endlessly entertaining.
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| Photo via Roadside Attractions. |
The film’s live-action cast is made up of Miloti, Topher Grace’s Ben (Grace’s husband), and a group of newcomer child actors, including Delaney Quinn as the film’s lead, Freddy, who spearheads the charge to escape the claws of Buddy. Grace gets the strongest characterization of the bunch, even if her character arc never gets the justice it seems to deserve, as the film eventually shifts the emotional focus to Freddy. There’s a stunning cast of particularly strong voice talent, giving life to the various creatures and objects that populate the world. Keegan-Michael Key (best known for being Barack Obama’s “anger translator”) provides the excited “hi-ya kids!” energy that makes Buddy feel both friendly and unnerving. Patton Oswalt (who’s either been on or voiced a role in whatever your favourite comedy TV series is) plays a sentient backpack, who serves as a ready source of comedic relief in a film already overrun with macabre black humour. Michael Shannon makes a second-act appearance as one of the film’s most sudden and memorable characters that I can’t bear to give away here, but he certainly remains utterly memorable. The film’s cast aren’t delivering career-defining performances — the film’s character writing is where it sags the most — but they are at the demented energy that a concept like this demands.
What makes the horror of Buddy so effective is its ever-present sense of “wrongness” — which Grace detects in the real world, and Freddy detects inside the show — a gnawing dread stemming from the absurd malevolence of its childish visual palette and glorious production design. It’s the same sort of psychological and existential darkness that makes the cult YouTube series Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, another in the “children’s education show devolves into soul-eating carnage” genre, so effective. It also evokes the hopeless pits of Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow (check out my review of their latest film here), another film that plays into the “lost media” vibe found in Buddy. The use of childhood media aesthetics also tees up a rather crushing narrative about abuse and neglect, gut-punching through the ruckus sense of humour. That’s really Kelly’s specialty here: crafting a film that moves effortlessly from the hysterical to the eerily unsettling, when the laughs aren’t coming from the jokes, but from the shroud of darkness laid over it all. It’s ridiculous, fundamentally silly, but just haunting enough to never let its viewer off too easy.
Buddy is now playing in theatres.
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