Hugo the Hippo (1975) 90m
To see this animated film from Hungary is to truly appreciate the word 'boggle'. Your eyes will boggle. Your mind will boggle. You will have never undertaken such boggling. HUGO THE HIPPO could be described as the worst film the Beatles never made. Its YELLOW SUBMARINE aspirations are obvious, its Marie-and-Jimmy Osmond songs just bewildering. The story might make sense to younger viewers, who have more compartmentalized ways of digesting plots of feature length, and HUGO does have a support group of adults who fondly remember the film when they saw it as children, although I suspect they remember the event more than the narrative. How many of us have revisited cartoons that we loved as kids only to discover they were embarrassingly lame when seen again years later? (I've winced too many times on this score, which is why I can't bring myself to risk checking out re-runs of old favorites like KIMBA THE WHITE LION or SPEED RACER). However to watch HUGO for the first time as an adult was, for me, a different experience. To wit, like watching an animated traffic accident. More than anything else, the word 'collision' kept returning to my mind. Second place went to 'Huh?'
First to the plot: the clove industry of Zanzibar is under threat when sharks invade the bay (they are dressed to look like bikers; whether or not they were supposed to look like gay bikers is another matter) and start eating the workers loading the ships, prompting the Sultan (voiced by Robert Morley) and his magician (voiced by Paul Lynde) to come up with the unlikely strategy of transporting an inland hippo herd to the bay as protection. What follows is too random to outline at length, but Hugo, the youngest hippo, becomes orphaned and encounters a group of children who look after him throughout a number of difficulties, until his rightful position in Zanzibar is restored.
The growing insanity of the plot (which at one stage becomes a war with vegetables in outer space) and the dreadful song lyrics (Hugo is so hungry that he could "eat the ox in oxygen") are so distracting that they overshadow the film's most significant failing point: Hugo is completely uncharismatic. He appears to have been drawn from an animal cracker and has a face made of buttocks. He doesn't even speak. When the children all rally around Hugo in the finale and sing "wherever you go, we go!" we ask ourselves "Why?" The poor rendering of the central character is one of many bad judgments that weaken the film (or improve it, depending on how bad you want it to be) and make you wonder if there was any one guiding force behind the project - it has such a crazy-quilt feel that it looks like a horse designed by committee. I don't find any fault with the animation, which has been handled with some imagination (at least they have a bit of fun with scene transitions), and the earthy color palette (burgundy, slate, straw, etc) tries to do something a little different by acknowledging the film's African setting. The film's status as camp is assured not only by the Osmond tunes but also the hilarious miscasting of Lynde, whose inimitable speaking manner turns two-syllable words like 'sultan' into two monosyllables (once you've heard Lynde as The Hooded Claw in THE PERILS OF PENELOPE PITSTOP, you're not going to be able to picture him as anyone else). It all starts promisingly enough with Burl Ives' chummy narration - he's a natural for storytelling - which informs us that this story is about a hippo, which is a short way of saying 'hippopotamus', which is a long way of saying 'river horse'. But after that, it's all downhill. In short, this review is a long way of concluding that HUGO is indeed a river horse - although one designed by committee.
(Incidentally, I never discourage people from checking out films for themselves, so don't be put off HUGO in spite of what's been said here. Not that I'm trying to be hippo-critical, or anything)
sburridge@hotmail.com
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