Search The Archive
Monster Road USA
Bruce Bickford is the greatest animator you've never heard of. This poignant, insightful documentary enters his solitary life and unearths the secrets that have driven him to painstakingly create intricate, and deeply strange, claymations for decades. Even Bickford's best-known creation, the 1979 Frank Zappa film Baby Snakes, is utterly obscure. His work is made on a shoestring in a tiny studio in the basement of his decrepit Seattle home.
Contemplative and introverted, Bickford's work has been shaped by incidents that have left numerous psychological scars. He was bullied in a family of boys, mistreated at school and in the military. He continually disappointed his overachieving father, a star engineer for Boeing aircraft manufacturers. His surreal animations constantly revisit themes of oppression and the underdog overcoming adversity and exacting violent revenge on those who wronged him.
'Bickford has been making underground flicks for nearly 50 years. But as Monster Road'a funny, moving cinematic biography of him'proves, he lives an inner life so rich and bizarre that he hardly needs adulation.' -san Francisco Weekly
D Brett Ingram P Brett Ingram, Jim Haverkamp WS Submarine Entertainment TD Video/Col/2004/80mins
Brett Ingram was born in North Carolina, USA. Films include: The Garden Parasol (1993, short), Spent (1995, short), Panic Attack (2000, short), Armor of God (2001, short, co-dir).