Wild Oysters

This is a very unusual stop-motion film from Charley Bowers. What's unusual about it is that the structure of the plot is much like a Tom & Jerry or Looney Tunes cartoon but using the strangest looking but still charming stop-motion characters.

The film begins with a dog and cat having a strange game where they try to outdo each other in eating--it's pretty weird. Next, a nasty little mouse appears and begins mistreating the cat and dog and you really won't like this rodent. Later in the film, the mouse gets his when he is continually assaulted by strange little clay oysters! It's all pretty weird--and a bit like a milder version of Itchy and Scratchy.

So, aside from some very good stop-motion, Bowers has managed to create a charming world and plot that make the film well worth seeing. Oh, and if you see it, you may notice that the animals (particular the dog and cat) are a bit like the early work of Dr. Seuss--not copies, really, but just similar.

Now here's an oddity, a stop motion animation short featuring the vengeful oyster that was integrated into animator-comedian Bowers earlier live action short HE DONE HIS BEST, from his period as a comedian in the Chaplin-Keaton-Lloyd manner.

This one deals with cat and mouse conflict of the kind we've gotten used to seeing in drawn animation - which was Bowers' original field of specialization. It has the same sadistic detail - the cat's tail is tied in a knot under the floor boards, trapping it during the ensuing action. The technique is very accomplished, though there was work of this kind (if not this standard) in films like METAL EATING BIRD and it seems curious that Bowers did not continue producing what must have been an admired cycle to extend his silent movie career into sound where he seemed so much at home.

Where Charley Bowers comes up with these ideas is anybody's guess, but "Wild Oysters" is another bizarre and very funny comedy from this unique artist. The stop-motion/puppet animation is excellent as always, with very interesting and detailed sets, weird animal characters, and an enjoyably wacky story.

The story features a series of confrontations between a family of mice and a variety of other creatures that they encounter. The mouse family's home inside the wall is an adorable little setting, with all kinds of interesting detail in their beds, furnishings, and other features. The mice have to contend with a weird-looking dog, a weird-looking cat, and most of all the "Wild Oysters", who are pretty peculiar themselves.

It's imaginative, fascinating, and fun to watch - a surreal world where you never know what is going to happen next.

This is a genuinely strange little film, the sort of thing that used to pop up unexpectedly on TV on rainy Sunday afternoons when I was a kid, the kind that would make me sit up and say "Where on earth did THIS thing come from?" As it happens, this particular oddity came from the fertile imagination of Charley Bowers, a mysterious and under-appreciated artist who was a newspaper cartoonist, an animation pioneer, and a silent movie comedian. His surviving work is often dazzling and almost always dreamlike and hallucinatory, but Wild Oysters just about takes the cake and could hold its own in any festival of Cinematic Weirdness.

Bowers was an unsung genius of puppet animation, and his work was quite sophisticated for its time. In this short our setting is a kitchen where we meet two characters, a goofy-looking dog who wears plaid pants and a similarly goofy cat, also in plaid pants. The animals seem to have a cordial relationship and kick things off by casually eating metal kitchen implements together. (Animals eating metal objects was one of Bowers' recurring motifs. Make of that what you will.) Soon we meet a family of mice who live in the kitchen wall, in a charming apartment where a number of human cast-offs have been adapted into useful household items: their beds are sardine tins, Junior sleeps in a matchbox, etc. The story gets underway when Pop Mouse goes out on a foraging expedition. He is confronted by the cat, but triumphs over her handily by boring a hole in the floor, pulling her tail through and tying it in a knot. Just for good measure he does this to the dog as well.

At this point we recognize that the mouse is the central character. Having dispatched the cat and dog he commences searching for food, but gets himself caught in a milk bottle. A nearby oyster (where did HE come from?!?) makes no effort to help, so when Pop Mouse manages to extricate himself he kicks and pummels the oyster. This action seems entirely out of proportion to the oyster's offense. All the turmoil which follows is the direct result of the mouse's ill-tempered outburst, so perhaps the director was trying to teach younger viewers a lesson about civility. Or, more likely, he was simply letting his imagination run loose and didn't care about teaching anything in particular. In any event, the enraged oyster calls upon his fellow mollusks and before you know it they've surrounded the mouse and are taking turns biting him. The mouse escapes and razzes them, but they link together and follow him across the kitchen, inchworm-style, like a big angry snake. The mouse pins down all but one of the oysters, but that one proves to be grimly determined: he latches onto the mouse, follows him back to his domicile and proceeds to make his life a living hell. The rest of the film consists of the mouse's desperate attempts to outwit and elude this dogged oyster.

I've never seen anything quite like this short. I haven't even mentioned the insanely cheery chorus of singers who underscore the action with a semi-tuneless song apparently intended to "explain" what we're seeing. I don't know if the song was Bowers' idea or added later, but it only enhances the novel quality of our Wild Oysters experience.

It isn't easy to find information about Charley Bowers. According to an obituary published in the New York Herald-Tribune he wrote and illustrated children's books in his later years and was also a cartoonist for a paper in New Jersey, but he became seriously ill in 1941, the year this film was made, and died five years later. It appears that Wild Oysters was his last cinematic work. It's too bad that Bowers wasn't widely appreciated in his lifetime and didn't get to make more films, but viewers with a taste for Le Cinema Bizarre can be grateful that the guy was granted at least some opportunities to demonstrate his talent, and that many of his films survive and can be appreciated today.