Sunday, December 27th, 2009 (Short Film Sunday: Storytime)

For a lot of folks, seeing a movie on Christmas Day has become a time honored tradition, and unfortunately for everybody that does not live in New York City or Los Angeles, Terry Gilliam's latest flick The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was only released limited on the holiday. The new film is said by many critics to be a return to Gilliam's signature style seen up until 1988's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Not that the films that followed would not contain a hallucinatory style that couldn't be visually connected to Gilliam's previous works, as the "Americana trilogy" of The Fisher King, 12 Monkeys and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas takes on its own Monty Python-esque surrealist moments at times. Still, with Imaginarium harkening back to the days of Time Bandits and Gilliam's first stand alone directorial effort Jabberwocky, themselves harkening back to his days as a member of the comedy troupe Monty Python, it just seems right to take a look at the animated shorts the eccentric director made even before his days with the influential British group.

Before Gilliam's fame took off with the likes of John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Eric Idle, he was featured on a British children's television show with the latter three called Do Not Adjust Your Set. Gilliam would not be a star of the show like his future Python cohorts, yet the show would heavily feature his animation, as well as giving him a chance to direct a few episodes. It would be this style that would show through in most of Gilliam's side project short films, and his animation work on Monty Python's Flying Circus and the films that would come to fruition from the group.

The first short would be the strange film entitled Storytime, from 1968, a year before Flying Circus would make its television debut. The short, no surprise, doesn't carry a linear, coherent plot. It starts off with a man telling a story of a cockroach, and ending with a scatterbrained series of events happening within a Christmas card. The film would of course lead to another short called The Miracle of Flight, which would lead to Gilliam co-directing the cult classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail. From that point on, with or without the help of his fellow Pythons, his work behind the camera has become legendary with a huge cult fan base. So, if you are like me, and nowhere near New York or L.A. and are craving the first viewing of Imaginarium, here is Storytime to tide you over. Enjoy.