More than likely, you have never heard of Josh Raskin. In fact, when looking for an interesting short that I saw last year after reading it had been nominated for an Academy Award, I easily found the film I Met the Walrus. And despite the ease of finding his only body of work, finding any information on Raskin is difficult. What we do know about the director, interviewer, star, sound editor and animator of this unique short is that when he was fourteen, he had some interview equipment, and he managed to somehow score an interview with the legendary John Lennon at the King Edward Hotel in Toronto in 1969, catching Lennon at the age of 29, probably right before The Beatles' final studio album, Abbey Road, was released. How long was this interview just part of Raskin's private collection I haven't a clue. Was it published somewhere? Did it even make a local news channel? Screen in a school classroom? With the limited information on Raskin and his film, I suppose we don't know. But whatever the case, the interview doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know about one of the more iconic musicians in history. Conversely, the entertainment wielded from this piece actually comes from Raskin, as the entrancing animation captures the scatterbrained fantasy that would be a fourteen year old boy's mind whilst interviewing a rock and roll god.
I mentioned that the flick was nominated for an Oscar, but lost out to Suzie Templeton's inferior, in my opinion, Polish stop motion animated Peter and the Wolf. The short did win the somewhat new Daytime Emmy category of New Approaches in Daytime Entertainment, which went to Sesame Street this year. Maybe more of an achievement in my mind than others. Still, enjoy I Met the Walrus...
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