HITLER’S FOLLY
Bill Plympton Studios
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten, Shockya
Grade: C-
Director:  Bill Plympton
Written by: Bill Plympton
Cast:  Nate Steinwachs, Dana Ashbrook, Michael Sullivan, Kristin Samuelson, Andreas Hykade, Morton Hall Millen, David Shakopi, Kevin Kolack, Edie Bales, Alfred Rosenblatt, Ari Taub, James Hancock
Screened at:  Free Link, NYC, 6/3/16
Opens: June 1, 2016

Mel Brooks, who directed the film “The Producers”—which features the hilarious, boundary-shattering song “Springtime for Hitler”–can breathe a sigh of relief.  His reputation as the creator of what is arguably the best, most audacious laugh-fest about the 20th Century’s worst tyrant easily matching Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 “The Great Dictator,” stands without a real modern challenge.  Attempting another imaginative entry into that sub-genre is “Hitler’s Folly,” a work of animator Bill Plympton.  Plympton is known largely for his 1987 “Your Face,” an animated short film nominated for an academy award. It involves a man seated in a chair crooning about the face of his lover, and as he sings, his own face starts to distort in various ways.

The animator now allows a potential audience to tune into a charmless, witless, “Hitler’s Folly,” free at www.Plymptoons.com, though donations are welcome.  Did I say free?  Yes it is, but the movie is hardly worth the price of admission.  “Hitler’s Folly” asks, “What if Hitler succeeded in his efforts to become a painter?” The usual guess is that he would not have pursued a career in politics, the Nazi Party would garner 3% of the vote, and World War II might have been avoided.

Not this time. Hitler does become an artist, World War II is not averted, but some of the incidents of humankind’s greatest folly, in particular the unbelievable horror of the concentration camps, would have turned out differently.

Many events taking place in Mr. Plympton’s film—which consists of archival shots, fake archival interviews, and animations particularly of a strange-looking duck—are invented, though some of the action could conceivably have taken place.  We might even be convinced that as a kid, Hitler had found a duck which was unable to fly, nursed it to health, and one day found the cage open figuring that the bird had flown away, though his optimism lasted only until a roast duck was served for dinner.

We do know that Hitler’s favorite composer was the anti-Semitic Richard Wagner, whose profound and lengthy “Ring” cycle glorifies ancient gods and heroes.  But what we “find out” in this film is that inspired by the epic stories, Hitler opts to produce a “Ring des Nibelungen” with an animated duck in the lead role.  The duck looks something like what a collegiate Al Hirschfeld could knock out in about a half hour.  Perhaps the most notable picture in this film is one of a smiling Hitler walking hand in hand with his Anas Platyrhynchos.

The film’s introduction could be dispensed with.  A crazed-looking fellow (Michael Sullivan) urges Josh (Dana Ashbrook) to look for a box in his apartment.  Josh, who resembles Jim Carrey, discovers proof that Hitler (Nate Steinwachs) was an animator, now and then facing the camera to narrate while two Nazi officers are pounding on the triple-locked steel door—“the kind which every city apartment has.”

This historical revisionist material is bookmarked by a caricature of Hitler’s childhood pet, Downy Duck, The Nazi Party name comes as an abbreviation of National Animation Cinema Institute, and the goose step symbolizes the need of moviegoers to raise their feet to avoid the stickiness of the refuse in the theater aisles.

If former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were to watch “Hitler’s Folly,” he would come out of his doze half way happy to see that “Arbeit Macht Frei,” the infamous sign at the entrance of Auschwitz-Birkenau, has nothing to do with extermination.  In one “interview” a former camp inmate (Andreas Hykade) exonerates the place, insisting that it was a center for cinematic production.

At a seriously overlong sixty-seven minutes, this freebie had long outlasted its appallingly unfunny material, one which lacks even a modicum of the kind of satire we should have expected from our experience with “The Great Dictator” and “The Producers.”

Unrated.  67 minutes.  © Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online

Story – D
Acting – C
Technical – B
Overall – C-