The British animation artist Phil Mulloy embraces this radical approach and uses it to create a complete, individual language that reflects a chaotic world filled with dark humor. His movie The Sound of Music (1992) rips open the veils of respectability and tackles all the various expressions and tones of violence. Through the use of pathetic-looking characters he constructs sequences of radical images and situations experienced by the leading character during one day of his life. These horrifying images are bleakness incarnate: A vicious dog fight that ends with the dogs ripping open the throats of all present, a family where the father commits suicide and a charity function that turns into a bloody cannibal feast of sexuality and violence. There is no motive for the death, the murder, the sheer unmitigated level of evil, and even the moment of birth lacks any hint of compassion. The overall metaphor of rampart sexuality, death, cannibalism and murder one after the other establishes an anarchical world that refuses to bow down to the accepted norms of good taste and kitsch. This refusal raises profound social criticism but also empathy and compassion. This plethora of imagery is a scream of protest, a sound that cuts through the ordinary expectations and chips away at the viewer’s complacency.
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