I Am Not an Animal

I Am NOT an ANIMAL

Airing Wednesdays at 11 pm on the Sundance Channel

By Troy Patterson

As if throwing down a gauntlet, or perhaps just dropping its pants, the animated series I Am NOT an ANIMAL announces its aims in the introductory moments of its first episode. As the score swells majestically, a noble owl soars through a moon-filled sky, past rabbits in a meadow and into an electrified fence. The music cuts out with the sizzle of this symbol of wisdom frying, which is further the sound of the show's creators saying: Yes, the following will be grossly juvenile in its particulars; no, we do not have the slightest inkling of shame about that. The BBC originally aired this six-episode series last year, and though the Beeb's own online comedy guide gets no more effusive than to call the show "intermittently amusing," I Am NOT an ANIMAL will immediately trip the cult-comedy alarm of any hardened absurdist or silly Anglophile. The program is a minor masterpiece of goofy-profound gaggery in the Monty Python tradition and an instant dorm-room classic.

That high-voltage fence surrounds the labs of Vivi-Sec UK, a research concern now working on top-secret Project S, which involves the genetic engineering of talking animals. The boss dreams of fashioning loyal house pets trained to coo "I love you" to their masters, but the scientists have somehow created a menagerie of nattering bourgeois twits. In the words of Winona Matthews, a bulldog, theirs is a daily routine of "tai chi, breakfast, face pats, art criticism, board games?." Winona, a glamour-puss, matches her eye shadow to her purple sweater-"It's cashmere with a nylon weave. That's what gives it the sheen!"-and goes heavy on the mascara. She spends days poring over back-issues of a celebrity glossy called UH!, fantasizing about Tim Robbins and working on a plot to swipe him from Susan Sarandon. She has fewer intellectual pretensions than her peers, but her food snobbery alone-"Have you tasted this goat cheese?"- marks her as part of this clique:

n Philip Masterson-Bowie. Horse. Leader of the gang. Wears glasses and a cozy green v-neck sweater. Counts himself an intellectual for reading the horror novelist James Herbert. Subject of much toilet humor.

n Clare Franchetti. Mouse. "Being clever is tiring," whines poor Clare. Gets caught lifting her opinions about film from a crib sheet. Both a virgin and a pervert. Wears four bras and thong underwear.

n Mark Andrews. Sparrow. Dreams intensely of breaking into the music business, at one point muttering about wanting to sleep with a man from Geffen Records.

n Hugh Gape. Monkey. Scottish. Hot for Clare.

A white rabbit named Niall also falls in with the group, although his background-the lone survivor among a more primitive batch of talking animals, he had the brain of a tech support operator jammed artlessly into his cranium-translates to a certain lack of sophistication. Niall doesn't even wear clothing, much less play Jenga. A cat named Kieron also lives among these critters, but he loses his head to vivisection not halfway through the first episode.

In the twist of farce that determines the show's plot, the other animals narrowly avoid the same blade. On the same night that Vivi-Sec's head honcho visits the lab, deems these freaks walking PR nightmares, and orders them killed, an armed band of radical animal rights activists-the sort who would rather lob grenades at noisy motorists than see the sleep of sheep disturbed-storm the lab. Our gang, thinking they're hopping a ride to the London they idealize, climb aboard the activists' truck, where they're confused by the reticence of the other liberated animals. (Winona: "Why don't these people say anything?" Philip: "I suspect they are working class, Winona. Many people below a certain level of breeding just point at each other and fight.") The driver swerves off the road after Philip asks for a bathroom break, and the pampered products of Project S, heretofore worried about no issue more pressing than whether the Chianti is corked, find themselves at sea in an English countryside which they're convinced is the big city. They must not only figure out how to survive but how to keep up the lifestyle to which they are accustomed. On top of reckoning with predators and people and all the usual vagaries of life, they further struggle to evade an assassin dispatched by Vivi-Sec-a gun-wielding ape/cat hybrid who thinks nothing of, say, shooting a panda in the head when it does not give him the information he wants.

The photomontage animation-all the creatures here are jittering collages and the Project S animals have expressive human eyes-helps to lend these proceedings spiky Dadaist verve and also a surreal emotionality. Series creator Peter Baynham, best known as a writer of the BBC's "I'm Alan Partridge", is an uncommonly witty doofus and has a singular knack for turning scenarios of acute inanity into parables. The title of the show is, of course, the famous pained assertion of John Merrick, The Elephant Man, a cry to be treated with dignity. Sooner or later, most people have occasion to feel as dislocated as Merrick, and the freaky fur balls of I Am NOT an ANIMAL are in sync with our everyday strangeness. Desperately naïve and hopelessly over-refined, possessed of bodies that fail to match up with their minds, these creatures are perfectly hilarious stand-ins for all us talking animals walking around on two legs.