Heavy Metal Was More Than Just An Insane Soundtrack
The Pioneering Cult Classic Dreamed About The Future And Potential Of Animation In Ways Few Others Ever Had; Even If That Dream Occasionally Became A Nightmare
Tristan Young @talltristan
The most influential ecosystems and cultural trends from which animation come from, be it in historic or modern terms, are not hard to identify. The Disney Industrial complex manifested several golden eras of 2D animation. Japan exported manga and all of the dazzling and detailed possibilities it offered to the world. Pixar brought the genre into the future and beyond with its application of CG animation. All of these epicenters of genre evolution have left indelible impacts on the history and trajectory of animation in film, which is not something you can argue as stridently when it comes to Canada. Sure development houses in Canada had their fair share of animated productions but none could really lay claim to the immutable relevancy of say Akira or Beauty and The Beast or Toy Story. On the other hand, Canada did produce Heavy Metal, and oh wow was that ever a hell of a thing. Somewhat lost to the overstuffed annals of history, Heavy Metal was consigned to relative obscurity shortly after its release. Its legal woes, esoteric story telling, and frankly ribald tone and aesthetics kept it from a broader audience. But those who know, know. Heavy Metal represented a wild shift in what animation was supposed to be, and whom it was supposed to be for. Its gender and sexual politics have not aged well but the fact that a cartoon even had sexual politics back in 1981 is kind of amazing. While one can debate if Heavy Metal was truly ever influential, there is no denying it imagined a larger, more chaotic world for animation to occupy before almost anything else in the medium.
Of course, before it was a film, it was a magazine. Heavy Metal, or Metal Hurlant as it was known as, was a pseudo popular publication in Europe created by Richard Corben in the 70s with a unique mandate. Stridently appealing to adult content and its attendant demographics, Metal Hurlant told stories inundated with violence, explicit sexual content, and all sorts of other gnarly stuff. Across swaths of short stories, it endeavoured to combine high fantasy, surrealism, and hedonism into one more or less cohesive experience. This eventually caught the attention of American publishing mogul Leonard Mogel (a role he was clearly born to have) while on an overseas trip. After both he and his wife became enamoured with the publication he secured the rights to publish it in a America. Only a few issues later it already had a readership in the hundreds of thousands.
It wasn’t long after that Mogel thought Heavy Metal could be repurposed into a movie, and sought to do so through animation studios in Montreal. After several failed pitches to American studios, he finally secured funding and resources up north. This is where things get interesting. Mogel reached out to Canadian producer Ivan Reitman, whose name would become only more and more known in cinema as time went by. Already a known and respected quantity for producing Stripes and Animal House, Reitman would soon go onto produce the seminal and iconic Ghostbusters. Mogel reached out to Reitman for advice on navigating Canadian production laws and bureaucracies. However in doing so he explained the concept of his film Heavy Metal and Reitman loved it so much he jumped on board as a producer.
What exactly is the concept of Heavy Metal though? As a loose gestalt of different stories untied only in their rhetorical goal of adult entertainment and little else, none of the anecdotes of Metal Hurant really encompassed a full narrative arc. Mogel and Reitman figured don’t bother to try for one then. Instead, much like the magazine progenitor, Heavy Metal was envisioned as an anthology, a loose collection of vignettes tied together through some loose thematic and expository writing within the film. That source of exposition is rather inventive in this case, and forms the crucible of what we could consider something close enough to a plot. Every compartmentalized segment in the film is told through the perspective of what is called the Locnar, a crystalline orb of pure evil incarnate. A sentient entity that wishes to recount its vast and innumerable experiences of corrupting various pockets of the universe with its malice and watching the horror it has wrought ensue. That the Locnar tells these stories to a young a girl it has chosen to torment for… reasons, is beside the point. It’s all the set up the film needs to explore its half dozen or so anecdotes of randomized tone and violence
It’s that seeming randomization, shifting styles, and aesthetics, and mercurial emphasis shifting from dead pan to slap stick to ironic to deeply serious that makes Heavy Metal such a surreal delight. A quick taxonomy of the stories in the film provides just a taste of what’s in order. Opening segment Soft Landing is a brief but eye popping introduction to how the Locnar reaches earth by way of an astronaut that makes planet fall in the coolest way imaginable. The next segment Grimaldi, is another short set up in which the Locnar disintegrates that poor astronaut and then sets its maniacal sites on his daughter. Both of these are more atmospheric and table setting exercises to establish what the viewer is in for than anything particularly substantial. They’re not wholly superfluous though as the planet re-entry sequence establishes right away the film’s commitment to utilizing popular rock and roll of the day for no reason other than it would be really fun to do so.
From there thinks get far more elaborate. The Harry Canyon sequence tells the story of crime ridden and unsavoury New York, collapsing under the weight of its own decadence, corruption, avarice, and illicit sex work. There are flying cars, an impounded Statue of Liberty, alien refugees (“Goddamn illegal aliens”, as the titular Harry succinctly puts it) and extra planetary gangsters. The year is 2031, which surely didn’t seem like such a nerve wracking year to choose back in 1981 but will surely portend no small amount of existential dread now. Up next is the sequence Den in which a small dorky kid from the American heartland is transported to a fantastical planet, transformed into a hulking Adonis of a man (although his inner monologue remains delightfully nerdy and pre-pubescent) and is tasked with preventing warring factions of taking control of the Locnar. Of course the Locnar is manipulating events to foster ongoing war but poor Den can’t be bothered with the inter-dimensional politics and stratagem of it all when both a damsel in distress and a sociopathic cult leader want to get it on with him.
Things get delightfully absurd in the next segment Captain Sternn in which an odiously amoral captain is on trial in an far flung space station. With some Locnar aided theatrics he and his sidekick stage an escape that is not lacking in dramatics or destruction. Surely this is all an allegory to the corrupting nature of power and privilege, but it’s too campy to feel compelled to read much into it. The tone swings wildly in the next segment B-17 in which a WWII era bomber limps back to base after a perilous and calamitous mission, only for the Locnar to fiendishly zombify all the corpses on the plane leaving one lone surviving pilot to fend off all of this insidiousness. Animalistic horror segues into straight up Sci Fi stoner comedy in the next sequence So Beautiful and So Dangerous when two outrageously high alien curriers and their robot pal who can only be described as in horny jail abduct a congenial secretary from her job at the Pentagon. The Pentagon. The imagery of the modern American fortress dwarfed by a spaceship that looks like a remix of Pac Man deserves to be more iconic that it is. It’s in this sequence where Heavy Metal’s under appreciated sardonic wit really shines. When the robot friend falls for said secretary he can’t quite understand why she doesn’t think they’re compatible. “I don’t want to come home one day and find you screwing the toaster”, she explains. Hard to argue with that.
Considering the random, gossamer like flakiness of all of the segments, the final one Taarna is presented in a much more reverent and dramatic tone. It’s as if all of the other segments were leading up to this, that a confluence of sorts would come from them adding poignancy to the crescendo. While Taarna is indeed a much longer sequence, it seems just as arbitrary in a purely objective sense. Taarna tells the story of a world besieged by putrid and monstrous abominations made through the poisonous influence of the Locnar. This marauding force invades and sacks cities and countries alike until a lone warrior of legend puts an end not only to them but to the Locnar itself. Except not really because remember the Locnar is telling all of this to a little girl whose misery it has personally decided to micro manage for an evening. But also then it blows up so who the hell knows.
In other words, there is a lot going on in Heavy Metal, but one shouldn’t need worry about it being a cohesive or even coherent experience (why does simply recalling a memory of the Taarna sequence cause the Locnar to combust in the present??). This is more of a strap in and enjoy the ride kind of experience. Rather than look for a thematic through line within all the stories beyond green orb is evil, the best abstraction one can draw is how the anthology design of the film is perfect for its unique developmental process. While the Montreal studio served as something as a hub to aggregate and collate everyone’s work, Heavy Metal was the result of multiple different animation studios all with their own unique talents, insight, and aesthetic approaches. It makes perfect sense then that the tonal vibe of each discordant story in the film would also have its own unique brand of animation.
Harry Canyon, with its depiction of a New York that has been consumed by its seedy underbelly has a grimy and granular animation style. Lines are jagged and scrape against other giving each cell a frenzied kind of friction to it. Meanwhile Den and Taarna, the two most whimsical and otherworldly stories, relies on a baroque and psychedelic color palate. Greens, reds, and pinks pop with aplomb and abandon and skin tones are rendered with exotic pink and purple hues. B-17, with its starkly bleak and isolated take on a zombie apocalypse relies less on color scheme than on mystifying shadows. Rather than acute vibrancy it trades in obfuscation. So Beautiful and So Dangerous, gleefully aware of how to parley its stoner slackerism into animation cells brings a buoyant and more slapstick kind of movement to everything on screen. The pearlescent underbelly of the ship begs to be viewed through some kind of hallucinogenic lens, as our alien friends would no doubt in endorse.
Much of this style can be attributed to artistic movements Absurdism and Dadaism. Both of them responses to the literal and detailed art movements that permeated the world after the technical advancements of the industrial revolution, Absurdism and Dadaism were over things being so precise and realistic, just because they now could be. These movements opted for baroque imagery, impossible shapes and compositions, incongruous colors and color schemes. Animation in film and TV had steadily evolved to the point where it had achieved the ability to render its subjects in ways that were perceived as analogous to real life counter parts. The animation ecosystem was primed for such movements to manifest within and Heavy Metal is a wonderfully salient example of this.
The technical details in which Heavy Metal was brought to life are likely to inspire debate as to their efficacy. While the design of its look is fascinating, its execution is a bit more remedial. Clearly limited by budget and resources, the film is animated in what’s referred to as on the twos, meaning only every second frame has movement plugged in. This keeps production costs down but also makes the movement look less fluid, more jilted and stiff, and with a clipping sense of stunted momentum in the frame rate. Interestingly enough though some of the sequences such as when Taarna flies on her bird creature friend were created via rotoscoping. Rotoscoping is a technique where sequences are filmed in real life and then animators draw over those recorded frames to make it look animated. This technique is equal parts infamous and obscure due to the horrendous application in the 70s cartoon adaptation of Lord Of The Rings. The messy and nightmarish depiction in it basically consigned rotoscoping to something of a niche and alienating animation style. Although in the case of Heavy Metal it does provide some interesting, if choppy perspective shifts and parallax style depth to other wise two-dimensional animation. The technique was considered for the climatic house explosion scene at the hands of the Locnar at the film’s conclusion, but limited time prevented such an option. Instead they just blew up a model in real life in one of the most sub textually fuck it moments in cult cinema. It’s hard to tell if this rotoscoping technique is at play when the astronaut orbits space in his ride of choice in the opening sequence or if that is more anachronistic stop motion at work. The sporadic shuffling of the dents and contours in the vehicle interspersed through the fames almost suggests claymation but that can’t be right?
While one can look back on the technical and stylistic details with histrionic intrigue, some of the subject matter must be approached with more of an interrogative scrutiny. A lot of Heavy Metal has not aged well in terms of its depiction of women and their roles in well, anything- even far flung fantasy hypothetical settings. The line between liberating female sexual autonomy and that of exploitation was murkily drawn at best in the 80s. As the line has more starkly metastasized in modern pop culture so to has it shifted. There’s a lot of nudity, a lot of sex, a lot of dudes (or robots) getting laid by women all of whom ascribe to the exact same dogmatic stereotype of how men thought a woman should look in the 70s and 80s. Reasonable people can argue on whether or not this was in the service of introducing animation to a broader province of discourse and subject matter. After all, live cinema had delved into these topics without condemning the whole medium to libidinous excesses, so why couldn’t animation expand its horizons? This is fair to an extent, but one must recognize that nearly every sex scene or that with nudity is told from a male hetero-normative perspective. More saliently they are there to accommodate and appease male hetero-normative orthodoxy. Harry Canyon, a nominally boorish asshole of a person and not much to look at just gets a total babe thrown at him. Den sure looks fine, but even the female characters that want to kill him are too distracted by their insatiable desire to get it on with him. In the last sequence, Taarna has no sexual exploits, but nearly every step she takes in the film, especially the laboriously long getting dressed scene, is fetishized ad nauseum. None of these moments are there in solidarity with female control over their own sexual liberation. They are there for horny, shallow men.
It’s striking how some of the sequences have faired better subjectively speaking than others even outside the thorny topic of sexual agency. Younger demographics were no doubt enthusiastically engaged with with the more ostensibly epic and gratuitous sequences Den and Taarna. The visceral violence, Tolkien-esque crusades of good versus evil, and climatic showdowns speak to the Saturday morning cartoon format only with a juiced up on cocaine vibe that young adults would gravitate towards. In retrospect the simplified narratives and conventional plots elicit little more than passing interest when watching now. Although the moment when two competing cult leaders fight pathetically over the green orb of doom, with one of the pouting in the most insolent of tones, “stupid bitch it’s my Locnar”, remains hilarious in its inanity to this day. Meanwhile the Harry Canyon sequence is a little too impressed with its own cynical nihilism that one can’t help but groan a little. On the other hand, B-17 professes no smarmy edginess, relying instead on primal and inchoate dread- motivations that prove much more timeless. So Beautiful So Dangerous is actually the one earnest attempt at romance simply for the sake of mutual fulfilment; a story where a deeper understanding is at least hinted at, interspersed with more powder being snorted than is humanly possible- good thing these are aliens with vacuum cleaners for noses we are talking about then.
It seems non-coincidental that Den and Taarna, two sequences that seem a touch dated in their juvenile wish fulfilment, also share similar musical characterizations. This highlights a strange dichotomy among the holistic parts of Heavy Metal, in that it is bifurcated between rock & pop of the era and then by a weirdly ornate and epic orchestral score. The score was by Oscar wining composer Elmer Bernstein and he does his best to add a John Williams-esque flare of grandiosity and majesty. It may be fitting for the more heroic and urgent moments of the story, but it’s a drag considering the moments that aim for levity or the bizarre instead of pomp and circumstances get the far fun more rock and roll offerings. Sammy Hagar’s titular Heavy Metal serves as something of an unofficial theme song and while it’s a bit blunt and turgid at first, once the tempo picks up it’s so much fun. Don Felder’s Takin’ A Ride captures the surreal and rapturous atmospherics of much of the film perfectly and with some gnarly power chords no less. More cerebral picks like Veteran Of The Psychic Wars by Blue Oyster Cult add interesting sub textual and propagandistic layers to all the carnage and mayhem. Devo is playing in a bar, and it might actually be an alien version of the group- it’s awesome. I vital piece of historical context is that Heavy Metal predates MTV so this is one of the first instance of being able to listen to this kind of music set to fictional and imaginative short stories before the ascendancy of the music video. Sadly clearing the legal rights to licence all of these tracks because such a labyrinthine mess that they were not able to secure them all for home release until the 90s, which was a huge part of why Heavy Metal wallowed in obscurity after its theatrical run. It’s ironic that what was supposed to be one of the main draws of the film ended up banishing it to legal and undiscovered purgatory for nearly 15 years. The other tragedy is that for a Canadian production, there is no Canadian music; clearly an unforgivable oversight.
Luckily, Canadian artists are at least well represented in terms of voice talent. With Reitman at the production helm it should come as no surprise that he would gather fellow Canadian alumni to assemble his cast of unruly characters. Most notably is John Candy as the voice of muscular hero Den, or at least his endearingly scrawny inner monologue, as well as the perpetually horny robot in So Beautiful and So Dangerous. Harold Ramis, who would go on to play Egon in Ghostbusters, was the coke-snorting alien Zeke in So Beautiful and So Dangerous. The indisputably lovable Eugene Levy provided vocals for the morally onerous and duplicitous Captain Sternn in the eponymous segments Most of the actors had yet to really hit their stride or made their impact on film so it’s fascinating to observe their talents, or at least their voices, in this bizarre time capsule of a project.
Still the fact that such an audacious project even exists, especially considering no one really asked for it, is kind of amazing. With a style out of synchronization with contemporary animation, subject matter to which the producers were not even sure there was a demographic for (not in animation at least) and a soundtrack mined from the legal hell, Heavy Metal is a chaotic mess of contradictions. And yet from all of that chaos are countless sparks of ingenuity, stylistic enterprise, and pioneering sprit. It becomes lost and stumbles on the way, gets high on its own supply, and occasionally caters to toxic stereotypes, but it forges ahead and searches for the moments when that horrible, terrifying idea of freedom yields new frontiers. By now other animated films have taken things further and with greater efficacy. The path has become well forged, but it wasn’t when Heavy Metal dropped a corvette into space 40 years ago. Things are different now, and the world of animation owes at least a small debt to this weird delinquent film; there was no going back once this Heavy Metal came out, whether we appreciated it at the time or not. To paraphrase Sammy Hagar in this very film, it was a one way ticket.