Quarxs is an early computer-animated TV show from 1990. It was produced three years before VeggieTales and Insektors, four years before ReBoot, five years before Toy Story, and thirty-two years before Morbius.

Created by digital artist Maurice Benayoun, it’s a fake documentary showcasing imaginary lifeforms called Quarxs. They have a strange relationship with space and time, and their behavior in the physical world is peculiar. For example, the Elasto-fragmentoplast wraps around small curved objects and smashes them, while also turning liquids into solids. The Spiro Thermophage lives in pipes and causes hot water to flow faster than cold water. And so on.

Basically, the Quarxs are gods of the gaps. Everything confusing about our universe (from dark matter to the missing socks in tumble-dryer) is directly or indirectly caused by them. The show consists of a rambling Attenborough-style scientist capturing Quarxs and putting them in a cage and demonstrating what they do. Then there are credits.

If this sounds like a total waste of time, well, don’t say I didn’t warn you. Quarxs is basically an art demo for a nascent medium (computer graphics). It was supposed to wow people at SIGGRAPH demos and get cited in post-predeconstructive media studies journals. It was not supposed to be particularly compelling TV.

You have to force your head into a weird space to enjoy it. Think how an abandoned internet message board from 1999 feels. Empty, irrelevent, superseded, and chanting with an eerie, hypnotic aura, as though its sheer deadness gives it power. That’s the space where Quarxs lives and dies.

The media landscape of 1990 was different in ways that barely make sense now. Battle-lines were drawn up and fought over digital art – even whether the concept could exist. Computers were regarded by artists as business tools – “computer generated art” made as little sense as “cash register generated art”. One of the challenges for historians of computer-generated art is that many rejected the title.

Quarxs had a hard row to hoe. There were no TV shows like it, and few precedents in the art world, either. It’s one of the founding examples of digital art, along with Frank O. Gehry and Heath Bunting. It’s a piece in a puzzle that’s been solved for so long that it’s hard to believe that there was once nothing here, just a blank space.

(Fans of classic gaming will remember a similar shift happening at the same time. PC games in the 80s were branded as “intellectual” fare: meaning flight simulators and CRPGs and text adventures. Action was the domain of consoles. Then, within a few years, a flurry of fast-paced action games for DOS shattered that preconception: Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Prince of Persia. “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen” – Lenin)

To be sure, CGI was limited in 1990, which cramps Benayoun’s visions greatly. Half the time, the determining factor in a given Quarxs’ abilities is “can we animate this on a SGI IRIS with 2MB of memory, y/n”? The Elasto-fragmentoplast turns liquids into solids. Why? Mostly because it saves the animators from having to render fluid physics, which would have been a pipe dream in 1990. Unlike Steve Speer’s (probably even more groundbreaking) short “The Only Taste Is Salt”, the show consists of short and simple camera movements, and there are no human characters.

There’s some entertainment value. The narrator of the show (a self-described “esteemed cryptobiologist”) is obviously quite insane, and makes frequent references to some unknown people (or things?) persecuting him for his views. His explanations of the Quarxs are questionable but hilarious. Why does the Elasto-fragmentoplast pursue rounded objects? Because, as a male, it has a fetish for curves.

Benayoun seems to be laughing at the conservatism of traditional media artists. Near the end of the show a new species of Quarx is discovered, the Mnemochrome, that vandalizes priceless works of art by swapping bits of them in and out of each other (with a prominent digital scanline effect). The narrator has an aneurism.”Good heavens! They have no respect for anything!”

Is it true? Is technology the end of art? Probably only to the extent that it’s the end of everything. Evolution is a ladder seemingly without an end: no creature can command the top forever. We only exist because other animals don’t. Soon there will be something else standing above us, and the ruins of our world might then seem as strange as Quarxs does in 2022.  “Remember Man, as you pass by, as you are now, so once was I. As I am now, so you soon will be, together in Eternity.”

The 1980s were years of faceless corporatism: this echoed and rippled through the decade’s cartoons.

Who made He-Man & Masters Of The Universe? Nobody knew. The show appeared on your TV set once a week, as if by magic. You knew the studio: millions of grownups still have conditioned Pavlovian reactions to the Nelvana bear, the bouncing DIC ball, the “Filmation presents…”.  But it was easily forgotten that human beings created the show. No kid could name one of them.

This changed in the 90s. A shift toward creator-driven content meant networks began branding shows around their lead creative personnel. Every kid knew The Simpsons was “made” by Matt Groening, and Ren and Stimpy was “made” by John Kricfalusi. Properties became inseparable from their creators. You were supposed to think your favorite cartoon was made by one guy doodling alone in an artist’s loft.

This creator-driven approach could easily backfire. Sometimes “creators” turned out to be self-destructive assholes, or hacks who’d fluked into (or stolen) their one good idea. Also, associating a show with a person meant the brand as a whole could easily become toxic: attempts to restart Ren & Stimpy now face the obstacle of John Kricfalusi’s personal life, and The Simpsons‘ wholesome “stick it to the man” satire becomes a rougher laugh in light of Matt Groening’s (alleged) executive-class flights on the Lolita Express.

But it was still an exciting era that rewarded strong personalities and odd perspectives. None of the tentpole shows of the 90s (Beavis and Butthead, South Park, Daria, King of the Hill) could have existed in the 80s, and although they were derided as juvenile toilet humor at the time, the reverse was actually true: it was the decade when TV animation grew up.

In other words, the 90s should have been Ralph Bakshi’s moment.

You have heard of him. X Rated cartoons? Rotoscoping? Blaxploitation? He’s one of animation’s great auteurs, and his work is suffused by a violent, turbulent energy that elevates their lowbrow material. Ralph Bakshi isn’t always good, but he’s always Ralph Bakshi.

Although he’s a titan of 2D animation, it’s easy to slip into past tense when discussing him. His classic films all date from 1972 to 1983, and by 1990 he hadn’t made anything good for a very long time. Was he still relevant?

His 1992 film Cool World was a devastating misfire. A jokeless, plotless, idealess nothingburger featuring bad animation and bad live action film composited in a bad way. Cool World marked the final death rattle of the adult animated film, with rubbish such as Heavy Metal 2K being the final rigor mortis of the medium’s cadaver.

Adult animation, it was believed, still had a future on the silver screen, where the stakes weren’t so high (and failure meant the studio took a bath of a few hundred thousand, rather than tens of millions). And in the mid 1990s, HBO gave Bakshi a shot at redemption.

He “redeemed” himself with Spicy City, a sci-fi anthology show hosted by an Elvira ripoff called Raven. In classic Bakshi fashion, most of the budget was evidently spent drawing very large breasts. Truly, he is to boobs what Robert Crumb is to asses.^[1]62.5 hours were spent workshopping a joke about the irony of a man called “back-she” being more interested in womens’ front sides but one of our financiers backed out, saying it was … Continue reading

The show (laughably advertised as the first “adults only” cartoon) proved to be another failure. It was a one season wonder, cancelled after six episodes. But that means nothing, in and of itself. Maybe it was just ahead of its time. Let’s find out.

I exhaustively deep-dived into Spicy City. Which means I watched three episodes that someone uploaded to Youtube.

Tears of a Clone

An eyeless detective is hired to track down a human blob’s missing “daughter”.

…Or, as the show relates the plot: “Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah? Blah blah blah.”

Holy fuck, this is the talkiest cartoon I’ve ever seen. Where’s the action? The dialog scenes go on and on. I want to go back to nineteen-twenty-whenever and throw Max Fleischer’s  Phonofilm sound equipment in the Potomac in the hope that cartoons remain silent. Maybe it would help if the characters occasionally said things that weren’t cornball detective cliches. “There’s just the small matter of my fee…”

That brings me to another issue: Spicy City’s setting.

The show aspires to an edgy cyberpunk aesthetic (like Gibson’s Sprawl). But 59-year old Bakshi had no natural affinity for high tech worlds (or desire to learn) so he said “screw it” and went with film noir.

Think of the hackiest noir cliche you know: it’s here. A PI who’s down on his luck? A dame in trouble? Smoke-filled clubs filled with sleazy characters? Fashions that consist of trenchcoats, fedoras, zoot suits, cocktail dresses, and pearl necklaces? All here.

Welcome to the future. We dress like this.

Bakshi’s cyberpunk world looks suspiciously like a 1940s Hollywood filmlot, with story choices to match. It’s so dated and old that it’s jarring when a character uses a computer. Yes, cyberpunk draws on noir. But Spicy City does so excessively, and the sci-fi plots (cloning, virtual reality, and cyborgs) are tonally incongruent with Bakshi’s world.

In short, nonsensical setting, weak story, twice as much dialog as necessary, and hideous character design. Fuck finding the girl, this guy needs to find his missing eyeballs.

Mano’s Hands

A bongo player called Mano Mantillo is the hottest thing in town. That’s Spicy City worldbuilding for you: a cyber-metropolis where everyone’s crazy over bongos.

Mano’s hands made him a star, but they have a life of their own. When mob enforcers cut them off for nonpayment of debts, they begin strangling people.

Here we see Bakshi’s lifelong fascination with black and latino culture, mixed up with the trope of the demon-possessed musician (Robert Johnson, The Devil and Daniel Mouse, Soul Music, Rock & Rule, and so on). In effect, it swaps one set of cliches for another.

I didn’t love “Mano’s Hands”. It has less dialog and it’s certainly gruesome enough, but the premise is dated and lame. Is this really what we’re doing with the “world’s first adult cartoon show”? Ripping off EC Comics and The Addams Family?

By the way, Mano is Spanish for hand, thus the episode’s title is “Hand’s hands”. I wonder why his surname isn’t Martillo, which is an eighth-note bongo pattern. Mantillo simply means “mulch”.

“Love Is a Download”

Same setup as “Tears of a Clone”. A private investigator is hired to track down a missing girl. However, the client is clearly an abusive stalker, and the PI develops feelings for the girl.

Here the action takes place in virtual reality. Essentially, it’s Baby’s First Cyberpunk Plot: “what if virtual reality was better than real life?” The detective’s an obese slug in reality, and the girl’s a battered victim. But in cyberspace he’s a buff stud, and she’s a…helpless geisha? Empowering stuff, ladies.

Here, Bakshi’s cultural references finally leave the 1940s. The stalker Jake (who appears as a shark in the VR game) is dressed like a Miami Vice extra. Again, it doesn’t quite work in a cyberpunk setting, but at least it’s not ridiculously off.

I was confused by the choice to make the woman gorgeous in real life. Shouldn’t she be ugly, like the male detective? I guess she had to be attractive for Jake to have an interest in controlling her, but he could have easily had a different motive (maybe financial). I don’t know. In a show about the gritty side of life, it’s strange that woman aren’t allowed to be unattractive.

I have mixed feelings about “Love is a Download”. The main problem is that the virtual reality sequences are incredibly long and overwhelm the episode. I think this is because they’re barely animated and must have cost virtually nothing to create. It’s like watching a slideshow.

So that’s my taste of Spicy City. 

Maybe I saw the three worst episodes. Unlucky. I’ve now watched 50% of the show, and probably won’t bother with the other 50%.

It has no spark to it. It wants to be the edgiest thing on TV but it comes off as dated, lame, and “OK boomer”. The basic plots are all 20-50 years old. Raven is excellently animated but the rest of the show is just barely acceptable. The adult content seems tame next to, say, South Park, or even less famous fare like Crapston Villas. As a sci-fi drama it doesn’t even reach Aeon Flux’s knees.

But I don’t regret watching it, because I had an epiphany about Bakshi.

He’s not a creator. He’s an enhancer, and an adapter.

Fritz the Cat is Robert Crumb.

Wizards is Vaughn Bode.

Lord of the Rings is JRR Tolkien.

Fire and Ice is Frank Frazetta.

In all these cases, Bakshi acts as an amenuensis, an artistic midwife, adapting the art of someone else into film. He does a creditable job, capturing what’s great about the original and infusing his own style and personality. But he’s not building castles in the sky: he’s working from a foundation already established. That’s what he’s always been good at. You do not allow him to create something from the ground up.

He’s like a podcast host who can “riff” hilariously in a room full of funny people, but who could never carry a solo comedy act. Spicy City demonstrates what that looks like: a dull, derivative slog with plentiful boobs but no clear sense of what it is.

Bakshi fans in 1997 had no idea of the drought that was about to follow. The lone and level sands stretch far away.

This film was preceded in 2000 by hype: it was a smart sci-fi horror film that would revolutionize a stale etc.

Movies are often preceded by hype – have you ever noticed this? Whenever a big budget film arrives, countless advertisements appear, all of them telling you to see it. How convenient. Almost as though someone’s being paid off. The human race sickens me. Anyway, I rewatched The Cell to see if it was as good as I remembered. Then I realized I’d never watched it in the first place.

It’s about a psychologist (Jennifer Lopez) who performs virtual-reality based therapy on coma patients, entering their minds and speaking to them inside Plato’s cave. After a serial killer (Vincent D’Onofrio) lapses into a coma while in police custody, she jacks into his mind to learn the location of his latest victim.

It’s indeed a “did I watch this?” kind of film. The story blurs into other “smart” serial killer movies like Silence of the Lambs, The Bone Collector, and Se7en. Even the title seems designed to be forgotten. The surrealist moments are great but the real-world scenes are thuddingly generic: how many shots of grizzled detectives standing and shaking their heads around crime scenes do we need?

Ignore the cop show crap and you have an oblique, arty film set in the disturbed (and disturbing) psyche of a sociopath. D’Onofrio’s mental landscape is basically a Saatchi exhibit on a bad batch of PCP, and J-Lo sees creepy dolls, mutilated animals, bondage equipment, and so on in her quest to finally understand why Private Pyle stole that jelly donut.

Some sequences are almost brilliant enough to redeem the film. When Lopez enters the throne room and encounters the King (and a driving, one-note stab of brass ratchets up the tension)…well, I was hooked. It was beautiful and frightening. It would have been even better if something had happened, but Lopez leaves the dream without payoff.

A recurrent problem with The Cell is that it doesn’t know what to do with its visuals. They’re strangely unmotivated, just hanging in the air without connection to the story. The surrealist stage dressing produces horror and awe, but it doesn’t build, it only exists. Much of the film’s imagery cannot be explained except as a show-offy director demonstrating knowledge of Very Important contemporary artists such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Ermin, and Sarah Lucas. Remember those three women, staring open-mouthed at heaven? Does this relate to the story or characters in some way? Nope, it’s an Odd Nerdrum painting. Name-dropping done on a 33 million dollar budget.

It’s frustrating to watch genuinely inspired scenes (suspended in a glass cube floating in space, Lopez pushes her way out of the top…and discovers it’s actually the bottom!) squandered amid “quotations” and “references” to whatever the YBAs and the New Contemporaries were doing that year. Who cares? I don’t like that stuff to begin with, and why not make your own art instead of regurgitating someone else’s?

Would the mind of a serial killer really look like a disturbing Alice in Wonderland mindfuck, as movies perennially portray it? I don’t know. When I read the Isla Vista shooter’s manifesto I was amazed at how dull and flat he seemed. More like a line drawing than an actual human. He wanted to be cool – that was his only ambition. When skateboarding became popular at school, he skated. When hackeysack became popular, he kicked a little bag around.

Like the film’s director, he spent a lot of effort imitating cooler kids, and when he saw behavior he couldn’t copy (boys having romantic encounters with girls), jealousy and frustration drove him to kill. Delving into his mind was somewhat interesting, but it wasn’t a Hieronymous Bosch painting. If you want a vivid mental landscape, mindjack a furry. That’s where the action’s happening.

The Cell is the first film of Tarsem Singh, previously (and afterward) known as a music video director. The pipeline from there to directing feature films is a troubled one. Music video directors tend to make films that focus on sets, sets, and more sets, with plenty of open space for a nonexistent rockstar to cavort around in. Movies need to be more than stage dressing.

Singh is obviously talented, with a good visual eye. I enjoyed a lot of the shots and costuming, and so on. But again, he’s mostly dropping names, not making a movie. The most famous scene in The Cell is the horse guillotine…

In the comments, various people offer analysis (“this boy’s mind had a morbid fascination with dissecting everything and seeing on the inside, not afraid to see the blood and guts. At the same time doing it in precise surgical fashion – each segment equidistant”), as if it’s not just ripping off Damien Hirst’s Some Comfort Gained From the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything.

Did I say ripping off? I meant quoting. Art builds on art – everyone knows this. It’s the highest form of appreciation to just put a famous work of art in your movie, unaltered, with no commentary or context. You’re quoting. Quoting is good.

What isn’t good is The Cell’s casting. Maybe don’t cast a massively famous sex symbol your quiet, mousy psychologist: Jennifer Lopez hasn’t a prayer of inhabiting the role written for her. Vincent D’Onofrio is a good actor, but he’s very wrong in this. He’s a blue-collar truck driver who comes off as a dangerous, slack-jawed idiot. We don’t believe for a second that a man like him would have an encyclopedic knowledge of contemporary art, or be hip to the London YBA scene. His pudgy, brutal face is impossible to feel sympathy for, which sours all the smarmy crap at the end. The killer was abused as a child! All he needed was a hug! Spare me.

The film, like its characters, fails to handle the distance between dream and day. Time and time again, the movie pulls us out of surreal fantasy and into its own stupid version of reality, so the usual Hollywood cliches can appear (the ticking clock, the generic FBI agents, etc).

The Cell is a disappointment of the worst sort: a bad movie that could have been a good one. It sends phantasmal imagery soaring into the air…and then shackles it to millstones of literalism and pretentiousness, sending it plummeting to the ground. I wanted something more or new. Not flashbacks to a tearful child being yelled at by his dad. I’ve seen all that before, and I don’t care.

Here’s an idea: why not reveal at the end that everything we thought we knew about D’Onofrio’s childhood was fake?

We’re in the mind of an unhinged lunatic, after all. Are his memories reliable? D’Onofrio has every incentive to distort the facts to create sympathy for himself – couldn’t his shallow redemption arc at the end be yet another trap for Lopez? Why wouldn’t a man capable of murder also be capable of deceit?