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The Webcomics Weekly #232: Jazz Age Comic of Cats … and Carnage (5/9/2023)

By | May 9th, 2023
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

The Webcomics Weekly is back in your life! We bring cats and jazz music this time around.

Lackadaisy Pilot
Original Work by Tracy Butler
Directed by Fable Siegel
Produced by Iron Circus Animation,
Reviewed by Elias Rosner

Yes friends. We’re taking a bit of a detour this week into the world of animation thanks to the release last month of a pilot short film of the comic “Lackadaisy.” A Jazz Age comic of cats, contraband, and carnage, I’ve yet to actually read the comic despite it being 1000% my jam. However, this is a blessing in disguise because I can actually approach this film as a neutral observer. Natch! Full disclosure. I did back the short film on Kickstarter so…neutral may be the wrong word. Maybe new is better?

The job of a pilot is two-fold: to get people invested in the idea and to justify the existence of more. I can say, without hesitation, that this short does both. I’ll get to what I think are its shortcomings as a short film but as a piece of animation and as a proof of concept, Lackadaisy hits all the right notes. It conveys what makes the comic special, has a killer voice cast and animation team, and tells a story with lively characters and even livelier animation. As the saying goes, “You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll believe a cat can shoot a tommy gun.”

Seriously though, the film will have you grinning the whole way through as Rocky, Ivy and Freckle bumble their way through a liquor run in a graveyard and try to escape the clutches of Mordecai and his sibling trigger-happy cohorts Nicodeme and Serafine. Where else will you see such a fluidly animated slap fight between anthropomorphic cats lead directly into a BONKERS car chase at a dynamite filled mine? Nowhere.

And the animation is nothing if not impeccable. A team of 160 independent animators made this project come to life and you can see the passion put into the project. I LOVE the way the tails move and react with the characters, how expressive everyone is and, again, the fluidity of it all. They even added in post those animation guides on characters faces to capture the feel of early animation like stuff from the Fleischer Brothers or early Disney! At first I thought they left those in by accident but nope, that was an intentional touch.

My issues with the film come down mostly to the pacing. While it was a good move to complicate the narrative with the introduction of the titular bar and it’s owner, Mitzi May, it only happens 16 minutes into the 22 minute runtime of the actual plot. Up until that point, we’d only gotten Rocky & Co. perspective and I think cutting away to her that late instead of staying with them as they rolled up to the bar was the wrong move. The added pathos and familiarity it brings is good for people like myself who aren’t familiar with the characters. However, it’s not enough to justify the expanded scope.

The opening scene with Rocky on the train tracks is also a bit of a misstep, though this time because of the mismatch between what works on paper and what works in audio. Rocky’s mischievous tone and, well, rocky fiddle playing, clashes with the lofty tone of the poem he’s reciting, mangling it while somehow also preserving its wistful nature. This, ultimately, is the point of the scene and a good introduction to the character. It also creates a discordant opening that feels like it runs about a minute and a half too long.

The lack of a theme or a lead up to a theme is also a problem. The rest of the pilot has a wonderful score but it’s strangely absent during this scene. If it were more somber or eerie, like a storyteller of old drawing us in with pretty words, that would be fine. But it’s not. Rocky’s jovial, and purposefully bad, recitation is at odds with this choice, a problem that print doesn’t have because two tones can be sustained at once, one via the visuals (Rocky’s mischief) and the other via the words (storytelling ambiance.) This shows up later in Rocky’s other lines too, though those just needed a couple tweaks to keep his more theatrical & formal way of speaking from feeling stiff.

So, what we have is a A+ pilot brought down to an A-, and even that feels too harsh. Fans of “Lackadaisy” will almost certainly get a lot out of the little details I missed while newcomers will be entranced by the slick animation and unhinged (and loveable) characters. This is truly a triumph for Iron Circus Animation and for webcomics fans in general. I hope we get to see more and more from this project and now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of prohibition cats to read up on.


//TAGS | Webcomics

Elias Rosner

Elias is a lover of stories who, when he isn't writing reviews for Mulitversity, is hiding in the stacks of his library. Co-host of Make Mine Multiversity, a Marvel podcast, after winning the no-prize from the former hosts, co-editor of The Webcomics Weekly, and writer of the Worthy column, he can be found on Twitter (for mostly comics stuff) here and has finally updated his profile photo again.

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