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Here’s the newly released trailer for A Liar’s Autobiography: The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman, a film that we expect to hear a lot more about as Oscar season approaches. The 82-minute production, directed by Ben Timlett, Bill Jones, and Jeff Simpson, used 14 different studios to create its mixed-media animation sequences: A for Animation, ArthurCox, Beakus, Cake, Made Visual Studio, Mr & Mrs, Not To Scale, Peepshow, Sherbet, Steven Lall, Superfad, Treat Studios, Trunk and Tundra.

Reading the film synopsis, it sounds like the kind of original, totally left field production that is rare in contemporary feature animation:

Comedian, actor, physician, mountaineer, rugby enthusiast, pipe smoker, alcoholic and consummate Englishman — the late Graham Chapman was a man for all seasons. But this member of Monty Python was not one to let his already colourful life prevent him from making up an even wilder one. Published in 1980, Chapman’s outrageously false memoir A Liar’s Autobiography (Volume VI) — credited to Chapman and four others, including Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams — was a work of blithe, unashamed and inspired fiction. And it has now inspired this insanely entertaining animated biopic-in 3-D, no less.

Despite being dead for twenty-three years, Chapman himself is the star of the show, thanks to forty-five minutes of newly discovered audio recordings of readings from Liar’s done in Harry Nilsson’s studio. Fifteen different groups of animators bring Chapman’s dubious remembrances to life in a dizzying array of styles. Four-fifths of Chapman’s former Python comrades — John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam — crop up throughout, playing themselves and various other equally dubious characters Chapman encounters on his journeys. Whisking through Chapman’s sadly foreshortened life — he died of cancer in 1989, aged forty-eight — A Liar’s Autobiography recounts his years in medical school, his first meeting with longtime writing partner Cleese at Cambridge, the high days of Pythonage, his coming-out as a gay man (or seventy percent gay, according to a survey he conducted on himself), and, of course, his abduction and transport to the heavens by space aliens at the end of the eighties. Even cancer, it seems, cannot vanquish the truly inveterate liar.

The film will debut this weekend at the Toronto International Film Festival. It will air later this year on EPIX, as well as have a limited 3-D theatrical release in the US through Brainstorm Media. UK and Canada will also have theatrical releases.

Cartoon Brew | Permalink | One comment | Post tags: A for Animation, A Liar's Autobiography, ArthurCox, Beakus, Ben Timlett, Bill Jones, Cake, Graham Chapman, Jeff Simpson, Made Visual Studio, Monty Python, Mr & Mrs, Not To Scale, Peepshow, Sherbet, Steven Lall, Superfad, Treat Studios, Trunk, Tundra

There was a time when snow, tundra, and North,
The Arctic, and every frozen sight
To me did seem
Apparelled in auroral light,
The kayak and paddling forth.
It is not now as it was of yore;--
Drive the Caribou to where I may,
By night or day,
The herd that I had seen I now can see no more.

from your good buddy Tonto--Those were some goodtimes, Nanook.

No, I have not dropped off the face of the planet. I've just been a bit busy.

BUT!

You can see me ALL DAY at the Teen Book Festival in Rochester, NY this Saturday.


OR you can read my Book Brahmin interview at Shelf Awareness, in which I answer questions about books.


OR (blushing about this one) you can read this very nice, short piece written about me from the director of the Kalamazoo Public Library.


And if you give me a couple of minutes, I'll show you what Mother's Day looked like in the Forest yesterday.


AND you can enjoy this picture of what Mother's Day looked like in the Forest yesterday.




Truth in advertising: this is a picture from my camp, where we spent the day. It's about 40 minutes away (and 1000 feet higher) than my house. We did get snow at home, too, for about an hour, but the rain washed it all away.

It is snowing outside right now.

No, I'm not kidding.

This is why I haven't transplanted my seedlings yet.

Here's my entry for frozen. This is a new version of an old illustration I did years ago. After walking around most of this afternoon I has first had "Greetings From New England" but changed it "The Tundra" after I warmed up a bit. This was one of my first tries at doing my own lettering. I kind of like how the text came out but I'm not sure I like the placement. The penguin seems colder some how without it.