Loontown
Entry updated 20 November 2023. Tagged: Film.
US live-action and animated film (2023). Positronish Productions. Directed by Nir Yaniv. Written by Lavie Tidhar. Cast includes Kenneth Jay, Al Lubel, Digger Mesch, Nathan Osgood, Katie Snyder, Russell Wilcox and Anne Wittman. 18 minutes. Colour.
Jokingly described by its creators as "The Citizen Kane of balloon noir movies" (itself a reference to the Boston Globe's description of Bobcat Goldthwait's Shakes the Clown), this outlandish production imagines a Dystopian Los Angeles (see California) populated by sentient Balloons. Several notable film locations were used throughout the city, including the alleyway featured in a famous fight scene in They Live (1988) and the Los Angeles River in Chinatown (1974) with the animated sequences added on top of the live action backgrounds.
The murder of balloon (or "loon") informer Mordechai sends world-weary detective Muldoon on a quest to discover just who in Loontown is behind the lucrative "H" trade – H being the street slang for helium. The usual beats of a detective noir story are played straight, as Muldoon encounters various thugs, a femme fatale named Red and the eventual Villain himself, Big, a "party loon" who wants to – and, in the end, succeeds in – using the helium to fly to the Moon. Much fun is had.
A companion short story, "It Happened In 'Loontown" (January 2022 Apex Magazine) by Lavie Tidhar, appeared prior to the completion of the film. [LTi]
see also: Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
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