Reasons to Love: Twice Upon a Time (1983)

There are rare pieces of media that you just know that they will never be able to re-make, re-do, re-imagine, sequellise, prequellise, or turn into some modernised CGI nightmare Christmas special. Something that cannot be done twice. This one happens to be one of my go-to comfort movies.

It's it's slightly rude, it's nonsensical, it's hard to decide whether to take it seriously or treat it as a parody of every sappy kidvid that existed before its release. It's Twice Upon a Time, a weird animated movie made almost entirely with pieces of paper.

I only recently found out that they photomontaged a pass-through shot of a model railway bridge that the makers had lying around. I thought it was also made of paper for forty years and was double impressed by the shot for just as long. That said, the animation is still firkin amazing.

The plot is what you might call a typical kidvid plot: Two heroes save the world of dreams from the world of nightmares. Sounds bland and saccharine, right? It's very much not that.

This, like a few other of my favourites, begins with the bad guys. We start with the villains of the piece, specifically the main BBEG, going off about his plans to fill the world with nightmares. He doesn't have very loyal minions [who look like vultures, by the way] and they take some pestering to go on their mission.

This movie legit has the line, "Batty as rats, they are. They tapdance not, nor neither do they fart." Speaking about the heroic minions, the Figmen of Imagination. Yes. This movie has puns baked into it.

There's no rescuing the princess, though the heroine of the feature winds up in a pickle of her own gullibility at one point. The heroes have to rescue "Uncle Greenie", an old man who got short and bent.

There's a Jewish-coded Fairy Godmother ["Call me FGM, I hate excess verbiage"] who is pretty much an ineffective deus ex machina for most of the movie. She goes so far as to hire a trainee hero called Rod Rescueman. A hero so incompetent that he failed the application test.

He's a pretty good example of the world's worst hero. Focused entirely on the reward - a kiss from a rescuee - that he misses out on the actual heroism.

There's Ibor, the video gorilla. A robot that communicates exclusively in video clips. Largely from the Lucasfilm video archive. He also has the best villain screen death I have seen to date. You can NOT match it.

And there's Scuzzbopper. A clown with disconnected hands [don't worry, he's armless haha], the scriptwriter for nightmares who has aspirations for something more than that. Dude wrote an entire brick of a novel inside half a movie and Botch threw it out the window. No wonder he did a sudden but inevitable betrayal.

The animation is just plain amazing. Even more amazing when you learn that it was all backlit by a lightbox through pieces of paper. They included SMEAR FRAMES! Made out of PAPER! They had three-dimensional turn-arounds of birds in flight. Flapping. And made. Out. Of paper. If that doesn't boggle your brain box, get outta here.

The dreamland sequence is a pitch-perfect parody of saccharine kidvids of the era. This came out in the era of Rainbow Brite and Care Bears. So me, a grotty tweenager at first exposure, was instantly enamoured by the lampooning of such.

And the heroes of the piece? Ralph, the all-purpose animal [shapeshifter! Before Odo, before Beast Boy... probably after Plastic Man and the Fantastic Four] and Mumford, the "no-purpose nothing". A silent character who communicates through gestures and sound effects. I love them. Between the two of them, they make one functional person. And for the record, Mumford has the brain cell most of the time. Ralph is made entirely out of anxiety. I vibe with him so hard.

If you scrutinise it too intensely, some of the plot doesn't make a lot of sense, but... I love it all the same. I love the vulture minions. I love Scuzzbopper. I love the concept of the cosmic clock and the silliness of messing with time.

I adore the living fuck out of the nightmare scene with monstrous office equipment and ninja scissors.

And I love a happy ending where the world was saved by two goofs who mostly bumbled their way through the entire film. There's only one problem with sharing this movie with you:

There's no way to get hold of it legally.

So you have to do a lot of digging to get a hold of it. So, during your excavations, make sure you get your hands on the "HBO Cut". That's the complete version, and most beloved by weirdoes like me.

Try it. I can guarantee it's an experience.