ueer Duck: The Movie has the homespun charm of an early season of
The Simpsons, which is no surprise since writer-creator Mike Reiss worked on Matt Groening's classic family satire. Both animations—drawn in unfussy, thick-lined cartoon style—move at a breakneck pace, setting up clever references, double entendres, and musical numbers that slap an unsuspecting viewer in the face and get their points across quickly. (It was not uncommon for a half-hour
Simpsons episode to move through an epic's worth of material with gut-busting elegance.) And both giddily deconstruct individuals' absurd relationships to institutions—kids to authority, and here, gay men to a hetero world and campy queer culture.
Reiss takes advantage of the contemporary rift between '70s-born freewheeling gay lifestyle and modern gay domesticity, using it to throw his main character—the effeminate, slightly sassy, and definitely insecure Queer Duck (JM J. Bullock)—into an identity crisis. When turned down admission by the Happy Land theme park (here a stand in for homophobic, "family-first" establishments), Duck wonders whether a straight life would be better for him. Gay/straight perceptions are subsequently sent through the wringer, emerging as a call to sanity much funnier and almost as engaging as an Andrew Sullivan column.
Duck, followed around by his friends Openly Gator (Kevin Michael Richardson), Bi-Polar Bear (Billy West), and Oscar Wildcat (Maurice LaMarche), marries an aging, has-been diva and attempts to rid himself of his gayness but finds that commitment to a same-sex partner can be enriching and, well, life is just more fun when you get a Margaret Cho joke. Because if you're just like everyone else, "what's the fun in that?" Though funded by Paramount,
Queer Duck stands as an ideal for independent filmmaking, because it gives trailblazing social mockery something more: real humanity. As Wildcat says, "All across America, fags are at half-mast."
It's hard to ask for much from this movie, what with it being digitally drawn in basic, web-friendly cartoon animation. The vibrant (read: gay) colors pop as they're supposed to, but some nasty jagged edges can frequently be seen around the outlines of characters. Studio-recorded voices and 15 Broadway-inspired show tunes come across loud and clear. And once again, very gay.
Since
Queer Duck: The Movie is a straight-to-video release, it's at least thoughtful of Paramount to include several engaging, if light, featurettes on its making. "Getting Behind Queer Duck" follows its production, "The People Behind the Voices" interviews the voice actors about their craft, "Getting the Right Homosexual" describes the casting of JM J. Bullock as Queer Duck, "How to Find a Partner If You're Bi. Um Coastal" explores the relationship between creator Mike Reiss and director Xeth Feinberg, and in "Character Assassination" Reiss explains how he went about parodying the many has-been celebrities featured in the movie. "Queer Duck Shorts" provides access to the original 4-minute
Queer Duck online shorts, and the gay channel Logo includes a number of previews on the disc.
"If you're a sissy, or just a big prissy, don't get pissy, missy. It's Gay Day at Happy Land!"
