Terry Gilliam’s deleted animations from Monty Python and the Holy Grail might have been better off left in the archives instead of being put into the extras on the Blu-Ray version. For the time the animation was charming and even kind of odd but it was loved by fans. There are still people that swear up and down that this Monty Python and the Holy Grail was the best movie to ever be made in the history of cinema, but perhaps it takes a different eye to really see how these deleted animations could have been all that great. Certainly they have some charm, but even for that time period they don’t seem that great, despite being somewhat funny.
I suppose all of this is subjective since really it depends on what your style of humor is like. Do you enjoy the more complex and sophisticated humor or are you all about slapstick? If you happen to like this movie then there’s a good chance that you might like other movies just like it. That brand of humor is kind odd in its way but it carries enough charm that it could possibly cater to the current generation and those preceding it.
The thing is that Terry Gilliam doesn’t seem to think it’s quite as worth the time as others might. His casual dismissal of his own work isn’t that hard to buy simply because a lot of artists don’t really understand what they were thinking while they were engaged in their work at the time. Some of them have a plan and a well-laid out design while others shoot from the hip a lot and are almost never sure of what they’re doing until the job is actually done. The latter are those that are possibly the hardest to work with because they are almost never fully on one page with anyone, as they prefer to be on multiple pages with multiple people. Their attention span is just fine, it’s that they need to process more than one thing or they get bored and thus create something that’s not really worthy of their talents.
With Gilliam and these animations it really sounds like he was just bored and killing time. The fact that a few of them don’t really make sense could explain why they weren’t released or even heard about until now. Listening to him talk about the animations they seemed to have been an act of boredom on his part. Well, strange things happen when you’re up late and working on something that makes it feel like you’re banging your head against the wall. Drawing doodles is kind of the mind’s way of defending you against shutting down or losing focus. I kind of wonder what might have happened if all of these doodles had made into the film and what effect it would have had.
I’ve watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail once and to this day it’s probably not my favorite film, but it definitely got my attention.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oGpR_TP7ME
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