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Life's a Zoo Volume 1
Take a foul-mouthed, obnoxious pig, a sassy
feline, a confused creature from the orient, an out-of-place homosexual
and more, and put them into an animated Big-Brother type house and you
have Drawn Together.... oh I mean Life's a Zoo, an award winning
Canadian stop-motion claymation situation-comedy featuring an eclectic
group of animals thrown into a house with omnipresent cameras - the
similarities with the aforementioned show are abounds, but Life's a Zoo
will no doubt garner its own cult following as it is unique in its own
way. The contestants are, as I have previously mentioned, animals and
variations of stereotypes in reality tTV shows. There's Jake, the
selfish Pig who is obsessed with winning the show. Jake is in love with
Minou, a bulimic, jamaican Panther model who bears an uncanny
resemblance to Naomi Campbell. Some of the other contestants are
Chi-Chi, a ditsy Panda and Ray, the druggie, impulsive orangutan and
Rico, the homosexual crocodile. The contestants are thrown into a
gigantic house ("Somewhere in Saskatchewan") and each week, a contestant
will be "extincted", leaving the winner to take the house.
The episodes centre around the different challenges that the contestants
are made to do (like stay awake or avoid a pyscho murderer) and the zany
interactions amongst the contestants with overarching motivations, side
plots, rivalries, love interests arcing their way through the episodes.
The show is stylised around Big Brother-like sequences, with shots from
hidden cameras and cut-aways from to interviews of the contestants in a
interview room. Now, just to set the general tone, the humour varies
from the pretty low-brow to reasonably, well written subtle one-liners,
but on average, stays pretty close to the former. A couple of examples
do come into mind. The first few episodes do have instances of Jake
eating the proceeds of Minou's bulimia, which although is obviously bad
taste, but is still quite amusing.
Also, as a person of Asian background, I find Chi-Chi's constant
references to Chinese Takeaway and her misunderstandings due to her
ethnicity as an eye-rolling annoyance. It just doesn't seem to have the
cutting-edge offensiveness of South Park nor the well-written plot of
Drawn Together. The episodes though are still an enjoyable diversion.
The challenges forced upon the contestants are genuinely varied and
entertaining with some moments that are genuinely funny and amusing. In
saying this, the contestants are self-centric individuals with strong,
distinct personalities and they do not seem to gel together into an
enjoyable spectacle but are more akin to a mish-mash, in a contest of
whose personalities shout the loudest amongst the chaos. The animation
style is different and eye-catching, using raw, unrefined clay models
more akin to "The Trap Door" than Aardman. Each episode also contains a
live-action music video edited into it, providing an enjoyable, although
jarring and disjoint, interlude. The DVD also contains an extra feature
of sequences of hand-drawn frames put side-by-side against the
stop-motion animation.
In conclusion, this DVD is an acquired taste but is still an
entertaining diversion. It's no Drawn Together but if you're into that
kind of thing and love claymation, give this a go. |
