"Phil Mulloy is the most entertaining... not to mention the most viscerally enjoyable animator since, oh, Tex Avery... okay?" — Richard Meltzer
The antidote to all that is kitsch and sentimental, these direct, witty and acerbic fables, drawn in brush and ink, perceptively comment on human nature and challenge contemporary values.
Having worked as a writer and director until the late 1980s, his six-part series for Channel 4, Cowboys (1991), brought his work to national and international prominence. The success of these highly amusing 'takes' on generic codes and conventions, and their address of masculinity in a crisis of excess, prompted Mulloy to pursue these themes further in a series of more personal films. In The Sound of Music, his outrageous masterpiece which engages with the deep-rooted sexual and class-based politics of a seemingly arbitrary and violent culture, he rejects authoritarianism, materialism and conformism in favour of art – and especially music – as the conduit for liberation and individual assertion. His Ten Commandments are highly rhetorical statements about the absence, irrelevance and misappropriation of 'God' in an essentially secular world, and in the later Intolerance II he suggests playfully that organised religion is irrelevant and perverse in the world today. His take on sex is not always related to issues of power and status, though, as can be seen in the unmissable Sexlife of a Chair!
Definitely not for the squeamish or prudish, this definitive compilation of 24 films contains sex, violence, and scenes calculated to outrage horses!
Cowboys (1991)
Slim Pickin's (3 min)
'That's Nothin'' (3 min)
Murder! (3 min)
The Conformist (3 min)
High Noon (3 min)
Outrage! (3 min)
The History of the World (1994)
The Invention of Writing (3 min)
The Discovery of Language (3 min)
The Ten Commandments (1994-1996)
Number 1: Thou Shalt Not Adore False Gods (5 min)
Number 2: Thou Shalt Not Commit Blasphemy (5 min)
Number 3: Remember to Keep Holy the Sabbath Day (7 min)
Number 4: Honour thy Father and they Mother (5 min)
Number 5: Thou Shalt Not Kill (3 min)
Number 6: Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery (5 min)
Number 7: Thou Shalt Not Steal (4 min)
Number 8: Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness (5 min)
Number 9: Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbour's Goods (5 min)
Number 10: Thou Shalt Not Covet They Neighbour's Wife (9 min)
