Karl and Marilyn (2003)
Priit Pärn 
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0383444/



Priit Pärn is an Estonian animator about whom books should be, and are, written. (...) Totally in control of his art, dedicated to enforcing strict narrative drive, and utterly deranged between the ears, Pärn has produced a body of work build of mini-epics the bulk of which stretch over a half hour apiece. Often compared to the Monty Python oeuvre, both in terms of timing and topics, Pärn's subject matter is also very much in the camp of Billy Wilder (and not just apropos of his obvious lifts from the Wilder film canon) in the way he combines bitter and sweet. Good writers create memorable characters, and then they nudge them into harm's way; you can't tell which part of this process Pärn enjoys more. 

Karl and Marilyn is the artist's latest creation, and it's a riot. This is some demented shit, so stay with me, just stay with me here 'cuz I'm gonna explain the plot: The title characters are a man and woman who look somewhat superficially like Karl Marx and Marilyn Monroe, hence the names. Karl is a champion athlete who, as the story opens, is delighting the crowds that forever dog his place of residence by performing a wildly complex precision dive off a bridge into the local river. Marilyn is a poor girl stuck in an apartment endlessly unthreading string for her near-comatose matron behind a drawn curtain in a scene of domestic imprisonment whose parameters we can only guess. 

Karl is sick of the adulation, the flashed breasts from adoring fans, in short the damned trappings of all that damned fame. He sneaks out and makes a special trip to his barber. Normally Karl is instantly recognizable in public because of his flowing mane of red hair with matching beard; to his barber's horror, he insists the whole schmeer be shaved off. Crying wretchedly, his barber complies, and Karl emerges as a man no punter would give a second glance. The intrigue begins when Karl kills the barber, as Captain Kidd would his mapmaker, and takes his secret away with him out of the shop — or so he thinks, as he has been secretly photographed by a man across the street. (I'm not going to tell you the circumstance under which the man took the photo; it's truly priceless in its absurdity.) 

Meanwhile Marilyn is plotting to escape the apartment. While her captor is not looking, she reaches behind four legs of the woman's chair and saws them through one by one (truly a sign of coordination or, more likely, a comatose captor). As the matron falls back unconscious to the floor, Marilyn puts on that iconic white dress we know as Miss Monroe's subway-grate-blown costume from The Seven Year Itch. Buoyant, free and bursting with song, and only slightly stained with blood from the Matron's head injury, Marilyn and dress leap out the window and start prowling the streets looking for a wind-blown grate to stand on. 

What happens next is not just bizarre, goofy, deviant and whimsical, it's also tightly plotted. Pärn's line style of traditional animation appears at first glance to be highly caricatured and freewheeling, but Pärn has very definite ideas about where the scene is headed, where your eye should be headed, and what happens to shapes when people go around corners. Karl's face may turn into a wildly unnatural crest-shape when the hair disappears, but once he establishes this convention Pärn never goes off-model; like a Man Ray portrait, this is surrealism whose execution leaves nothing to chance. 

The subject matter is one of Pärn's favorites, the cult of celebrity, and he dissects it with a fertile inventiveness that plays with matches even as it douses your most basic expectations with lighter fluid. Whether genius or utterly otherwise, Pärn's scenarios deliver unexpected goods, like the UPS driver bringing to your door not a box of books but Steve Martin. Pärn is, in short, a lateral thinker who may yet have the chutzpah to answer some of art's toughest questions, questions like — What if a sober wrestler would study physics with an axe in Venice?