Review: 'Happy Happy Joy Joy' captures the rise and fall of an iconic cartoon, but underplays its creator's disturbing behavior
I remember seeing “Ed Wood,” and feeling somewhat ripped off that director Tim Burton gave us the triumphant Hollywood ending — at the premiere of Wood’s crap-masterpiece “Plan 9 From Outer Space” — and not taking us to the real end of Wood’s career, making porno films.
I had a similar reaction when I watched “Happy Happy Joy Joy: The Ren & Stimpy Story,” a documentary that captures the meteoric rise and spectacular fall of one of TV’s most out-there animated programs — but barely scratches the surface of the awfulness of the man who created it.
Ron Cicero and Kimo Easterwood, two longtime crew guys directing their first film, largely follow the storyline of a rags-to-riches-to-rags Hollywood story. Canadian animator John Kricfalusi toils in the L.A. trenches, recoiling at the cheap, toy-driven animated product around him — so he gathers some like-minded artists to start creating the kind of cartoons they loved, in the mold of Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones.
Most notably, Kricfalusi brings on Bob Camp, who is as talented and devoted to the old style of animation as he is. He also brings on Lynne Naylor, who becomes his production partner and, for a time, his girlfriend — but when they break up, Naylor leaves the production company they co-founded, Spumco. As one animator puts it, it’s like the parents divorced, and Mom left the kids with their jerk of a father.
Kricfalusi creates some characters and makes a pitch to the networks, who turn him down flat — one even has a security guard escort him off the lot. He meets Vanessa Coffey, a producer with ties to Nickelodeon, who dislikes the pitch — but likes two of the characters, a manic chihuahua and a not-very-bright cat. Coffey convinces the big cheese at Nickelodeon, Geraldine Laybourne, to give Kricfalusi a six-episode tryout with these characters, called Ren and Stimpy.
The show is an instant hit in 1991, an anarchic mix of juvenile humor and innuendo that sails over the kids’ heads. Nickelodeon, sensing the hip factor, reruns the shows on its sister network, MTV. Nickelodeon also orders 20 episodes for the second season.
Here’s where the fairy tale falls apart. Kricfalusi’s perfectionism, and his verbal abuse of his team, leads to budget overruns and missed deadlines — and his dismissive treatment of Coffey and the network brass leads to Nickelodeon firing him. Interviewed by the documentarians, Kricfalusi still calls the termination a betrayal by his Spumco staffers, especially Camp, and by Coffey — without ever acknowledging his role in his professional self-immolation.
If that were all to the story of how “The Ren & Stimpy Show” came and went from the public psyche, then I’d say Cicero and Easterwood did an admirable job of cajoling thoughtful, self-effacing interviews out of most of the principals — as well as commentary from some celebrity fans, including Jack Black and comic Iliza Schlesinger.
But that’s not the whole story. Cicero and Easterwood were well into production and editing when Buzzfeed News broke a big story in 2018, detailing Kricfalusi’s inappropriate sexual relationships with underage fans who came to Los Angeles and lived with him. The revelation reportedly convinced Kricfalusi to grant the filmmakers an interview he had previously denied them, presumably so he could frame the story his way. The filmmakers also interview Robyn Byrd, one of the two women in the Buzzfeed story, an artist who struck up a mail correspondence with Kricfalusi, and moved in with him when she was 16 and he was in his 40s.
The problem with “Happy Happy Joy Joy” is that Cicero and Easterwood leave this part of Kricfalusi’s past for the last 15 minutes of the film. Besides making Kricfalusi’s behavior with the young women — which, if not for the statute of limitations, might have put him in prison — an afterthought, the filmmakers give Kricfalusi the last word, a non-apology apology that includes a creepy invitation to see Byrd in person again.
The filmmakers didn’t do what they should have done, which was to bulldoze their edit and start over — to put the art of “Ren & Stimpy” and the abusive treatment of his Spumco staff in context of Kricfalusi’s actions as an alleged sexual predator. The results, as they stand, are uncomfortably like watching an old “Red & Stimpy” episode: Entertained at first, then somewhat saddened, then totally creeped out.
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‘Happy Happy Joy Joy: The Ren & Stimpy Story’
★★
Opening Friday, August 14, at the Megaplex Theatres, and available as a video-on-demand rental on most streaming platforms. Not rated, but probably R for language, crude animated humor, sexual situations and descriptions of sexual abuse. Running time: 107 minutes.