Once Upon a Girl
Dir. Don Jurwich, U.S., 1976
Severin Films, $29.95
With the recent death of Joe Barbera, it seems time to reevaluate the Hanna-Barbera legacy. Long the scourge of aficionados for their almost abrasively artless appropriation of limited animation as a way to cheaply launch into television, Barbera and partner Bill Hanna were nonetheless exceptional character animators in their early career, the golden boys of Fred Quimby’s animation unit at MGM. They created and made the best of Tom and Jerry and, truth be told, did figure out a way to keep animation a viable industry in America—by cranking out decades of cheap, witless crap like Josie and the Pussycats and Laff-a-Lympics, and occasionally throwing audiences an aesthetic bone with their surprisingly picturesque (if no less insipid) features.
But that said, I can’t help but think there’s more than simple nostalgia at heart of my affection for Yogi Bear, and I still find the googie stylization of The Jetsons charming and exciting—as validation, at least I can claim its futuristic utopianism synced up pretty well with its jerky, mechanical animation. It’s sad then that Don Jurwich, who did art for The Jetsons (and who, DVD producer Severin Films misleadingly assures us, was one of the “creators of Scooby Doo”), couldn’t translate at least a little bit of the kooky magic that made Hanna-Barbera so popular into his debut feature Once Upon a Girl.
New to DVD from self-styled “Criterion of smut” Severin, and originally released by something called “The Producers Releasing Organization International,” Once Upon a Girl packs Judy Canova-worthy hillbilly hyuks, mind-raping perversity, and splendidly dysfunctional cartooning into a baffling 80 minutes. Severin, who have released the gloriously sunkissed early Cinemax staple Felicity and films by Jess Franco and Walerian Borowczyk, now have to their credit one of the more singular cultural emissions of the 20th century—the very existence of a fully-restored, gorgeously transferred boutique DVD of this film is simply staggering. And unlike some of Severin’s releases, the value of Once Upon a Girl as erotic artifact is nil; there’s nothing in the film that’s even remotely productive as erotic stimulus, unless the viewer is a 12-year-old without access to the Internet, a scrambled cable channel, or a Sears catalog. To its credit, the film absolutely has to be seen (ideally with other people, to share the blame) to be believed—a genuine synaptic misfire from the dying Age of Aquarius, complete with brain-melting psychedelic palette, mincing faux-Medieval synthesizer score, and some vague anti-marriage browbeating about the problematics of “happily ever after.”
Jurwich, blissfully unwilling to transcend the convenient 23-minute structures of television animation, gives us what amounts to three episodes of a series, framed by neanderthalic live-action sequences of Hal Smith (Otis from The Andy Griffith Show) as a drag Mother Goose being tried in a Southern court on charges of obscenity for finally letting loose with “the real stories” behind various fairy tales, with more incest, bestiality, and pedophilia than you can shake a stick at. Each—Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, and Little Red Riding Hood—present their own motley assortment of perversities and cruelties, but the breaking point for any viewers who’ll want to opt out will come early on in the Jack and the Beanstalk story. Jurwich intercuts a graphic close-up of a frog giving a comely lass oral pleasure—for some reason, accompanied by farty synthesizer sounds—with an underage Jack gleefully humping a hole in a tree branch. With Jack discovered by said comely lass, a Scooby Doo-like chase ensues, set on an endlessly repeating forest background. I wish I could tell you I was making this up, but I’m not—the mental image will forever be pressed into the darkest, knottiest sections of my mind.
Best of the three segments, and the least willfully perverse, is the film’s take on Cinderella, which almost stakes a claim for the film’s legitimacy as some sort of anarchistic critique of the value systems implicit in the source texts. Showing a modicum of visual wit, the film’s designers—many of them Disney animators working under pseudonyms by night—model Cinderella and the Fairy Godmother directly after Disney’s, and the writers even bothered to put some effort into humor and pacing here. Cinderella’s debut at the ball as birthday-cake stripper probably speaks volumes more than the authors intended, as does an addendum in which Mother Goose debunks the phrase “Happily Ever After” by revealing the natural extension of the marriage of Eleanora and the Prince. Excepting some incest from the stepsisters, there really isn’t anything here that’s significantly more repellent than, say, Hoodwinked or Happily N’Ever After.
In case you hope this is the rare case where the perversity is enough to sustain the awful animation and dirge-like plotting, it’s not. The animation actually appears to get steadily worse as the film moves along, though the film’s single most artful moment appears in the final Riding Hood section. Amidst an extended rape fantasy, plagiarized in spirit from de Sade’s Juliette, the film gives way to a repeated segment of beautifully impressionistic color swirls -- putatively, a graphic representation of an orgasm—that gives hint of What Might Have Been with slightly more ambitious intentions. What would’ve happened if instead of playing naughty yuk-yuk hour, someone along the line had thought to produce a genuinely evocative and beautiful reconciliation of children’s and adult fantasies? Am I just fooling myself in thinking there might be some sort of value in a genuinely erotic take on the source text?
After all, who expects genuine eroticism anyway? “Adult animation,” nearly as old as the medium itself—look up 1924’s legendary after-hours short Buried Treasure on YouTube and marvel at how Once Upon a Girl doesn’t up a single ante—has rarely aspired to more than shock. Following the success of Fritz the Cat (a movie which, for all its X-rated controversy, produces nothing more offensive than a Tunnel of Boobies), a handful of me-too releases—this one and, perhaps most infamously, Dirty Duck—flooded what little American market there was for animated sex. Since then, we’ve outsourced to Japan. Producer William Silberkleit, in a refreshingly honest interview presented on the disc, admits that he produced the film solely to capitalize on Fritz and gives humble insight into the life and times of a Seventies sleaze producer during this brief but storied era of animation history. Say what you will about the film, but the presentation’s at least completely genuine—there’s no attempt to grant the work an ounce of undeserved dignity. I suppose I can take some small comfort in that, but for now I’m still haunted by frog cunnilingus. —BRENDON BOUZARD
