“Sometimes there’s a macrocosm and sometimes there’s a microcosm, and if you’re dyslexic like me you can’t tell the difference.”  – Bruce Bickford

While browsing the shelves in the gift shop at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, MD, I happened across a DVD called “Monster Road” with a captivating cover.  It showed a man that looked kind yet deranged, reaching out with a small clay figure in his hand.  I didn’t know what it was, but I did know that I had to see this movie.

Monster Road is a documentary about Bruce Bickford, an acclaimed clay animator from Seattle, Washington.  Bickford is probably the most well known for the work that he did with Frank Zappa, which includes The Amazing Mr. Bickford and work on Baby Snakes.

Bickford’s animation shows an immense talent and attention to detail.  I think that the following example, an excerpt from Bickford’s Prometheus’ Garden, is a great example of the sheer awesomeness of his work.

Monster Road documents Bickford’s life and inspiration through interviews, animations, childhood drawings and home movies.  The film reveals a great deal about Bickford’s character and the influences that have spurred him on to create animations that can only be described as horrifyingly beautiful.

In the film, we learn about the abusive family life Bickford dealt with as a child, growing up during the cold war and the difficulty he had fitting in.  He talks about his affinity for Peter Pan, who gave Bickford hope that “maybe the little guys could survive.”  Bickford brings up horrors from his past and talks about them with a nervous laugh and it is sad to think that without these horrors Bickford’s animation wouldn’t be what it is today.

Bickford’s animations are oftentimes filled with nightmarish images, carnage and the grotesque.  However, Bickford says that “when something really grotesque or ugly occurs in one of my pieces of animation I try to have it resolved somehow.  I try to have the character who’s behaving badly get their comeuppance quite swiftly.”  He tries to live by the principal, at least in his animations, that the “little guy” will come out on top in the end.

Bickford talks about the characteristics of Speedy, one of his little clay protagonist heroes, and it is hard not to imagine that he is talking about the man he wishes he could be.  “He takes no nonsense.  If there are sadistic killers in the land they better bag ass before he gets them.  He’ll put them in tin cans and make dog food out of ‘em.  He has this charisma of a five year old who had never had misfortune or at least he thought of misfortune just as part of life and never let it get to him.”