10. “The Miracle of Flight” (1974, short)
A slight but charming short from Gilliam’s peri-Python days, along with “Storytime,” “The Miracle of Flight,” this film serves as a summary judgement upon any Monty Python fan who might be so wrong-headed as to assume that Gilliam was anything but central to Python’s anarchic, meta-textual brand of silliness. All those qualities are here in spades, as is the animation style that had already become so recognisable and so indelibly associated with dead parrots, cheese shops and spam. Indeed, the tinned, reconstituted meat product that so obsessed the team (and there are linguistic essays dedicated to how one can draw a straight line from the first airing of the “Spam and Eggs” sketch to the word’s modern-day usage for unwanted email) gets a reference here too, as the man who invents the airline ticket (a breakthrough that precedes actual flight in Gilliam-land) proudly reveals that it’s for a flight on Spam-Am. Ostensibly a jokey retelling of man’s struggle to achieve flight, the film is a great example of cramming a whole load of jokes, personal flair and inventive nuttiness into a short space of time, with next to no resources.
9. “Storytime” (1968, short)
Actually a collection of shorts, none of which were seen together until grouped under this title as an extra for the re-release of Gilliam’s feature debut “Jabberwocky,” “Storytime” comprises three separate animations. The first is the seemingly sweet story of Don the cockroach, narrated like a children’s story, before (in the first extant example of Gilliam’s squashing-foot fetishism) a foot squashes him. Not to worry, intones the voiceover, because cockroaches are not very interesting, especially compared to the owner of the foot. This prompts a cavalcade of those cut-out Victorian photos with crudely moving limbs and jaws that are so iconically Gilliam/Python, before a terse title tells us that the animator has been fired. The second film details a man despised by his neighbors for being “the only Albert Einstein not to have developed the famous theory of relativity” but whose pride and joy, his hands, run off with a pair of feet and then scandalizes polite society. And the third segment is the slightest: a series of Christmas cards through which wise men, hunters and carolers trundle after each other. The first two ran originally as part of “The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine” and they’re still terrific little amuse-bouches for anyone attuned to the Monty Python sensibility, or anyone who has ever been a Gilliam fan. In fact, watching these after some of his more recent short films may restore your faith.
8. “The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen” (1988)
In a career including a large proportion of films that came across as folly to many, “The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen” has the reputation as perhaps the greatest as such. It supposedly doubled its initial budget during filming and made only a fraction back, becoming known as a huge flop, although that’s not an entirely fair assessment of its commercial performance. While the film was a money-loser, it’s relevant that it was a victim of the regime change at Columbia. And it’s not fair to dismiss the film on a creative level either. ‘Munchausen’ isn’t Terry Gilliam’s best, but it’s still a wondrous and hugely enjoyable feat of imagination, the director getting to play on a blockbuster-seized canvas of the kind he’s rarely had a chance to take on since. Based very loosely on the (exaggerated) adventures of a real-life German explorer, it stars relatively little-known stage actor John Neville as the Baron of the title, who’s persuaded by a nine-year-old girl (a young Sarah Polley, who says she was left “traumatized” by the film’s production) to reunite with his former comrades to save their city from the Turkish army, an adventure that takes them to the moon, to the kingdom of Vulcan (Oliver Reed) under the earth, and even inside a sea monster. However nightmarish the production might have been, every penny is on screen, with effects that still impress today, and the brace of cameos from the likes of Jonathan Pryce, Oliver Reed, a young Uma Thurman and Robin Williams (billed as Ray D. Tutto). But despite Neville’s fine performance, which goes some way towards painting the lead figure as a Colonel Blimpish last remnant of a dying era, there’s a slight sense of a hollowness at the film’s center, all production design and no substance, not helped by the impression that it’s a spiritual sequel to the far superior “Time Bandits.” Still, on a scene-by-scene level, it’s inventive and impressive, even if it isn’t Gilliam’s most satisfying whole.
7. “The Meaning Of Life”/“The Crimson Permanent Assurance” (1983)
We can’t credit Gilliam directorially with many of the skits in “The Meaning of Life” (though he was a co-writer and he appears in quite a few of them) as he’s really only responsible for the animations therein, but they are among the most memorable parts of this rather more hit-and-miss Python collection. The film itself is structured around the various stages of life, but features a much looser narrative than ’Life of Brian’ or even ‘Holy Grail,’ and in fact mimics much more closely the sketch format of the Python TV show “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” Gilliam, however, was responsible for directing the animated portions, including the opening credit sequence that accompanies the theme song sung by Eric Idle, and also the standalone 15 minute mostly live-action short film that usually plays as a pre-feature bonus, “The Crimson Permanent Assurance.” The daft yet somehow rather touching story of a stuffy old-school British accountancy firm turning to literal piracy when threatened by Big Corporate America, ‘Crimson’ turns an Old London office building into a pirate ship, filing cabinets into cannons and dusty old British stockbroker types into the swashbuckling scourges of the high (accountan-) seas. It’s glorious nonsense, but it shows Gilliam’s preoccupation with the idea of bureaucracy and his harsh estimation of his land of his birth: the Very Big Corporation of America is undoubtedly the baddie here and we are supposed to cheer for the creaky, cronky pirates right up until they fall off the edge of the world due to their “disastrously wrong” calculations about the shape of the Earth. ‘Crimson’ gets a couple of callbacks within ‘The Meaning of Life,’ adding a little meta-sauce to an already disjointed and ramshackle affair when an apologetic voiceover asks for viewer patience through interruptions caused “by an attack by the supporting feature,” but is probably, along with “wafer thin mint” and the Galaxy song, one of the best parts of the film.
