A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

"Bunny and the Bull" is possibly the most visually inventive film I've seen in my life. It begins with a title credit sequence with the camera gracefully flowing from object to object in a small room, like in Jeunet-Caro's classic "Delicatessen". It stays in that same Delicatessenesque vein while we meet our hero, an agoraphobe who evidently hasn't left his apartment in 1 year, and then the real fun starts...Our hero "Stephen" (Edward Hogg) stares at random objects in his meticulously cluttered apartment, and each object triggers a flashback. Each flashback is vividly adorned in scenery relating to the object that triggered it. For example, his first flashback comes from a box of fast food takeout. The flashback scene contains the actors and some real props but they are sitting inside an animated cardboard box. Occasionally cars will pass by the window outside, similarly animated cardboard cutouts.I found this visual style to be both eye-catching and wonderfully creative. Animation is very old school, using tricks of stop motion photography, hand drawings, confetti for snow, and projection screens showing dreamlike landscapes behind the action. It reminded me of the work of Michel Gondry ("The Science of Sleep", "Eternal sunshine of the Spotless Mind") or Tim Burton's old school stuff ("Nightmare Before Christmas", "Edward Scissorhands", "Peewee's Big Adventure") but ramped up on steroids. Everything is very vivid and pleasing to the eye with cartoonish colors and simplicity surrounding what ultimately ends up being a very complex story.The actors present a fabulous dynamic with "Michael" being the obsessively uptight dweeb who courts a girl for 3 years before working up the nerve to say he likes her, while his best friend "Bunny" (Simon Farnaby) is the antithesis: a devil-may-care hedonist who can bed any girl in under 2 minutes it seems. The movie is a series of flashbacks unraveling a strange adventure that the two of them had together, mostly silly escapades culminating in a life-altering event that just might alter your life as well.Something I found particularly funny was the way our hero is an animal lover, and a very outspoken one at that. He has a hilarious way of turning almost any situation awkward by expressing his views, almost like a "Debbie Downer" character. But if you're an animal lover you may find yourself cheering him on. For example, in one scene they are talking to a would-be matador who is relating the joy and elegance of bullfighting. He says something like "It is not a fight. It is a dance. A beautiful dance as only man and beast can do." And our hero Michael fires back "Really? I thought it was all about stabbing a defenceless animal in the back of the neck until he dies." And the matador says, "It is a peculiar dance, I'll give you that." Great sarcastic & deadpan humor along with hilariously awkward situations pepper this film throughout, making it fun from beginning to end. And as I alluded earlier, there is ultimately some great depth and power to this seemingly whimsical flick.If you're a fan of the directors I mentioned above, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Michel Gondry & Tim Burton... and I'll throw in Charlie Kaufman & Spike Jonze ("Being John Malkovich", "Synecdoche NY") and maybe Terry Gilliam ("Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas") then do not hesitate to see this wonderfully bizarre flick. In over 500 films, I've only given out about 20 perfect "10" ratings, but this film truly deserves the honor.

Paul "Mighty Boosh" King storms onto the silver screen with a cavalcade of imaginative imagery, from a snow globe mountain retreat to a clockwork bullfight, but then attempts to meld it all with an atrocious script, which is at times inane, elsewhere sentimental, and riddled with boring f-bombs. The dialogue is full of jokes but empty of wit or insight.Broadly (and it often is) the film is about a traumatised and possibly agoraphobic young man named Stephen who musters a lo-fi Euro road trip in his head, the landscape and characters forged only by the contents of his apartment. If it sounds like Amelie then that's because it is like Amelie, right down to the rippling piano score. Difference is, Amelie, under its sugary shell, contained pathos and humanity, and its surreal digressions were complementary to a solid and coherent plot.King's film is a cauldron of slapstick, surrealism and homosexual tension, all stuttering along on the power of a pair of lifeless performances. As a viewer all we have to root for is the soppy, infantile Stephen (Edward Hogg) and the crass, infantile Bunny (Simon Farnaby).There's an almost amusing turn from Richard Ayoade as a bored shore museum curator. Noel Fielding's matador cameo shows promise then descends into a loud nothing.Woven well into the wayward narrative, the animated asides are arresting in a Lloyd's TSB ad kind of way, providing welcome respite from the highly variable sketches in between. But ultimately they only serve to remind us of the talent that's going down with the ship. It all comes across as quite "random"; except we know it's anything but. It really was meant to be this way.The whole venture reaches its nadir with a homeless zoophile who drinks milk from a dog, at which point you may wish to follow Bunny and leap through the frozen ice to save yourself.

What makes this film absolutely sublime is the lingering melancholy - faint yet stubbornly persistent - ubiquitous through all the quirky, surreal, and comical sequences. It's never self-indulgent or over-sentimental. All elements, be it emotions, performances, sets, character development, or animation, are well-controlled and contained as a proper English would have it; yet it's radical, outrageous, bold, and sometimes uncomfortably daring. Elegance rises through vulgarity, and (almost unbearable) sadness screams silently. This film is unique, delightful, touching, funny, and yes, wicked. It's not Boosh but fans or otherwise shall be pleasantly surprised.

The boy was on holiday in Rome, having dinner with his parents at a restaurant. An Italian restaurant. When in Rome and all that. The lobster was in the restaurant too, but it wasn't on holiday. Shortly it would be executed by boiling water; a hot corpse to be dissected on the boy's plate. This was unacceptable to the lobster. As the waiter carried the lobster over to the boy's table, the pathetic creature decided to make a break for it. Wriggling out of the waiter's tongs, it smacked head-first into a low-hanging light bulb. The bulb shattered, hot shards raining down on the five-year-old's head. To this day, 'Mighty Boosh' director Paul King won't touch seafood. It's no coincidence that in King's debut feature, Bunny And The Bull, the most revolting European chain restaurant he can conceive of is called 'Captain Crab', serving up slimy portions of barely-dead crustacean.But back to that lobster for a moment: it doesn't take an armchair psychologist to drum up a corollary between the surreal and often fraught comedy of Bunny, and The Boosh, and that traumatic childhood incident. The plot of Bunny And The Bull does indeed deal with how painful memories can adversely affect our present outlook. If King can't go near shellfish again, his paranoid, agoraphobic creation Stephen 'Bull' Turnbull (played by Edward Hogg) can't seem to leave his Kings Cross flat for fear of something awful happening. This is a man so terrified of the unexpected, and of that which he cannot control, he has turned his dismal flat into a virtual mausoleum, stacking his own pee in jars, "and noting its PH".The reasons behind his self-incarceration are soon revealed: an ultimately doomed European road trip taken with his toxic best friend Bunny (Simon Farnaby). Initially taking in such genuine museums as The German Museum of Cutlery and the National Shoe Museum of Poland (your laconic tour guide, one Richard Ayoade), Bunny decides his lovesick friend requires more stimulating adventures, and soon they're picking up a sexy Spanish waitress Eloisa (Verónica Echegui), stealing stuffed bears and encountering a barking mad Hungarian tramp called Atilla (Julian Barratt), who much prefers to drink his dog's milk directly from the dog.Given the presence of the latter, and of a pleasingly restrained Noel Fielding who also cameos here as a booze-sodden matador, the real shocker is that this isn't in fact 'Boosh: The Movie' (which at time of writing, is apparently in the works). This, despite featuring - and apparently in all coincidence - a pale, long-haired man and a hairy Yorkshireman pottering through a surreal hyperverse. (If this were made in the 1960s, Frank Zappa and 'Monkees' creator Bob Rafelson would surely be exec-producing.) Instead, this movie utterly belongs to Hogg and Farnaby, who act out an anarchic and surprisingly touching meditation on male friendship, impotent bravado, and grief. Perhaps unsurprisingly, King's a huge fan of Bruce Robinson's classic, and there are various allusions throughout ("Sure I can't tempt you with one last little drink?" asks Bunny as the mismatched pair bid their farewells). Making the association explicit, the producers have even dubbed this one "Withnail & I for the mentally ill" - as if the latter weren't also conceived in the white heat of a near-nervous collapse. At any rate, as with Withnail, and the comedy of duo Oram and Meeten, there's deeper stuff going here on than just a bunch of stoner-style antics.All this is played out against part-animated, endlessly inventive handcrafted backdrops, including an underpass made from newspaper, a fairground made from clock parts and a bull made out of cutlery - not to mention a bravura credit sequence, which utilises everything in Stephen's flat from pocket calculators to postage stamps. If the most obvious aesthetic comparisons are to be drawn with the work of Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry and Terry Gilliam, fans of animation will be reminded of Czech surrealist Jan 'vankmajer, and even Oliver Postgate and FilmFair - responsible for bringing 'Bagpuss', 'The Wombles' and 'Paddington' to life on British televisions during the 1970s.An equally indelible impression is left by Simon Farnaby's cheerfully disgusting shagger-gambler, who with his second-hand sheepskin coat, and accompanying stench of mid-strength own brand lager resembles some disgraced 1970s polytechnic lecturer, or a younger version of the cult comedian Charlie Chuck. He also looks as if he's carrying at least three varieties of STD - if those STDs happened to be uniquely English ones.