Doggy Poo

(October 07, 2007)

While I was updating our Netflix queue I discovered something cool. You can watch movies online as part of your Netflix account. You get a certain number of hours based on what kind of Netflix account you've got. Last week I watched True Lies. Shut up, I love action movies and that is one of my top favorites. Jamie Lee did her own stunts, you know.

So last night while Joe was watching baseball, I was clicking around the Netflix selections that are available for watching online.

I found this description:

Um.

Yeah.

So of course I had to watch Doggy Poo.

Done in a creepy style of stop-action (the birds are particularly sinister-looking) Doggy Poo is at once disturbing and cute. Once pinched out of a grunting dog's butt, the baby Poo is rooted to the spot, subject to the whims of passing creatures. His traumatic immobility is only one of Doggy Poo's problems.

A side character is a pile of garden soil who taunts the despondent shit in an over-the-top black guy voice that's pretty cringeworthy. Why a black guy?

The filmmaker relies on sympathy to get the viewer engaged with the poo character. Unfortunately that means the poo spends way too much of the film's 33 minutes crying, mewling and hiccuping in fear. His quivering mouth and streaming eyes are just too much. I find that I am engaged with the emotions of the turd, but I wish it were a happier excrement.

I realize that, as long as I'm talking about a living, thinking turd in the road, my suspension of disbelief should easily expand to accept the film's time span. But still it must be noted: the dog takes a dump in summer. The story suggests that a year goes by. A year, and not one person cleans up a grunt in the road?

The voice characterizations are bizarro, as if the Koreans who made Doggy Poo had the script translated into English and they're reading phonetically, very very slowly. The soil talks really slow, but the most noticeably ponderous is a passing leaf who speaks so slow that it's hypnotic. The trauma described by the leaf about being at the whim of the wind is the first hint the Poo has that life is a journey and there's nothing you can do about some things, such as, well, wind.

This thing is a trip. My favorite part is that you can see fingerprints in the clay, left by one of the animators whose job was to make a pile of dooky come to life in cinema.

The film manages to play around with social themes such as class warfare -- we learn that, among the poo strata, a doggy poo is the worst kind of poo. The ultimate social message of Doggy Poo is that everyone has a purpose.

So if you're just a piece of shit, get online and watch Doggy Poo! You'll be inspired into searching for the value in your existence.