So, I hear you ask, what the utter
fuck? To be honest, I pledged to the crowd-funding of
this book purely on the premise that a horse could destroy the universe, which
essentially, and spoiler-free (it’s in the chuffing title after all) it does.
After that, this entire review is based on the research I did this morning
between sitting at my desk and actually starting the work I’m paid to do
(around 60-80 minutes all told).
First off, Morgan Cyriak Harris is
an animator who enjoys the surreal effects of the formal Western Art Tradition
technique of mis en abyme, or in other words, the deliberate
placing within an image of a copy of the same image and the subsequent
implication of infinitely represented worlds – think two mirrors reflecting
each other. In literary terms this could be the self-reflexive embedding of the
story within the story, something of which I am inordinately fond. In Harris’s
work this tends to be an animated grotesquery of self-spawned fauna fountaining
from mouths and anuses.
Still with me?
Links to some of his most viewed
animations are listed below, in no particular order other than the one with
Alan Titchmarsh comes first, because Alan Titchmarsh. I’m also very fond of
Chimpnology. I’m sure you’ll spot what I mean.
Such is his renown that he also
animated the Goth2Boss segment in an episode of The IT Crowd, won
an E4 E-Sting competition in 2009, and has created music videos for artists as
diverse as Flying Lotus, Bonobo and Japanese Electronica group Denki Groove.
So far, so Wikipedia entry. In
fact, you can probably learn more interesting things about him from his
own website.
Back to the book and we find
Buttercup in his stable and wandering around his field, minding his own
business, slightly recalcitrant at the interruptions of two bickering
scientists, who, unbeknownst to him, are experimenting on his mental
capacities. Once he realises, with his exponentially expanding intelligence,
Buttercup takes over the world from the safety of his field. That is until one
of the scientists, shamed and terrified by the hubris of it all, attempts to
explode him. Luckily, with his consciousness safely digitized, he survives as a
virtual horse, but this prompts an existential crisis which, in turn, leads him
to end the universe in an attempt to ensure his own continued existence.
Despite
the contradiction there, it does sort-of make sense, although there is a lot of
disbelief suspended like the Sword of Damocles over what might appear to be a
flimsy plot device. It’s a lot of fun, and quite charmingly silly, in keeping
with most of his animations, and against my better judgement (or rather, my
in-hindsight-post-judice) I really think I enjoyed it. A lot. It certainly kept
me amused while I was waiting for someone to find and unpack the wi-fi router.
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