There was an opportunity during the middle of the picture to deliver more characterization but it wasn't played out. B&B are stranded out in the desert and they run into their dads, two former roadies who slept with sluts. The reunited dysfunctional family sit around a camp fire and share a few laughs and flatulence. The next morning the fathers disappear and the boys are on their own again.

The film's director and creator, Mike Judge, does an adequate job with his first animated feature. The picture's production value is consistent with the television series, and in fact felt like the TV show projected on a big screen. Contemporary animated feature filmgoers conditioned to pristine and polished production values will notice the broken xeroxed pencil lines shimmer on extreme close-ups and dirt on panning cels. The animation drawings wiggle and then hold, then wiggle again in what could be called Trace-backvision.

There are many funny moments in Beavis and Butt-head Do America, including the flight to Las Vegas where Beavis pulls his shirt up over his head and breaks into the cockpit acting like a demented terrorist. I also enjoyed the bit of limited intimacy between Beavis and an old woman voiced by Cloris Leachman. Another worthy moment is the highway chase. B&B are locked in the truck of a speeding car. The boys manage to break open the trunk but are left with the dilemma of escaping by having to jump off the speeding car in the face of oncoming highway traffic, much the way Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid jumped off a cliff when surrounded by the law.

The boys do Hollywood for Beavis and Butt-head Do America © 1996 MTV Networks.

A Healthy Mockery
One sequence actually transcends the picture. B&B have a near death hallucination in the middle of the desert of dancing demons straight out of the world of Hieronymus Bosch. The sequence was based on the artwork of Rob Zombie. This sequence departs from the picture in style and medium, utilizing a digital ink and paint process, provided by Tape House Computer Ink & Paint, and serves as a contrast to the reality B&B inhabit on cel. There is also use of computer assisted design. In one sequence, B&B dance a la Saturday Night Fever on a disco floor as the camera pans down from above reminiscent of Belle dancing with the Beast. Another sequence portrays B&B as fire breathing giants destroying a city like a Little Nemo nightmare.

Where the picture really excels is when B&B appear as Starsky and Hutch, complete with Afros and bell-bottoms. There is a wonderful reworking of the Isaac Hayes song, "Shaft," titled "Two Cool Guys" that Mr. Hayes and Mr. Judge collaborated on. This is the freshest and most creative sequence in the picture. In the past, B&B have appeared as various representations on their TV series but the timing, music and total unexpectancy of the opening created a true film experience that is very funny. As turn of the century social critic Benjamin Casseres has suggested, "there is a healthy mockery, a healthy anarchic spirit." And this is why B&B is brilliant.

Beavis and Butt-head Do America should be celebrated. The picture is an immediate departure from the dominating Disney interpretation of animated feature filmmaking. And it is the first contemporary, hand drawn animated feature not trying to use the Disney cinematic form. Whether the creators are aware of the implications of producing an animated feature whose primitiveness is a bonfire for artistic freedom is questionable. The film does provoke and challenge. Necessary requisites for change.

What are the standards for judging art? Beavis and Butt-head Do America forces the viewer to judge it--and its "aesthetic indifference" as Marcel Duchamp put it. Throughout history, artistic thought has struggled against the dominating opinion of the time. An important factor in the experimentation of the arts is a quest for liberation. B&B react against the rigidity of the society, they are the banner holders for counter conformity and against the order that wants to repress them. It is not altogether coincidental that during the turn of the century in Europe, Diaghilev, Nijinsky and Stravinsky, among other collaborators, turned the cultural and artistic world upside down with their "barbarism." Other art movements provoke the same resentment. The Dada movement is another example of the need to challenge and redefine the "bourgeois" beliefs of significance and tradition.