TIKI TIKI (1971) — New 4K Restoration of a Truly Bonkers Animated Oddity!

7th House presents the new 4K restoration of a long-lost gonzo discovery: Gerald Potterton’s confounding TIKI TIKI (1971), surely one of the most what-the-#!@$*-is-this animated objects to emerge from the early ’70s (and that’s saying somethin’)—a movie that somehow manages to be a psychedelic ’toon, Hollywood satire, counterculture road movie, and radically reworked Soviet children’s fantasy (???) all at once. A decade before directing the cult animated landmark Heavy Metal, and soon after contributing to Yellow Submarine and earning multiple Academy Award nominations for his work with the National Film Board of Canada, Potterton made this... thing. And what a marvelously bonkers thing it is.

Dig if you will: our heroes are a bunch of animated monkeys trying to make an epic adventure movie. Leading the pack is their director, a hog-ridin’, peace-sign-flashing simian surrogate for Dennis Hopper straight outta Easy Rider. (They even named the chimp Dennis, man.) Their principal piece of equipment is the FMM 70, an all-purpose, rocket-propelled flying movie machine. And the groovy movie they’re making? A live-action, human-led adventure that is actually huge chunks of Rolan Bykov’s eye-popping, clown-infested 1967 Soviet children’s fantasy Aybolit-66. Taking a page (or three) from the cinematic hijacking hijinks of What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, Potterton chops it up, dubs it silly, and folds the whole mess into his own movie, which bounces between scruffy, vibrant, handhewn animation and Bykov’s lavish live-action phantasmagoria with a gleeful disregard for how a normal movie is supposed to behave.

Was it any surprise that the promotional team was left with one particularly hairy question: how do you solve a problem like Tiki Tiki? Potterton later admitted that they couldn’t decide whether to market the film to “kids or stoned teenagers or whatever,” but (what a time to be alive) the film somehow found some fervent fans and even picked up a Canadian Film Award—with an appropriately absurdist twist: the prize went to Mosfilm designer Aleksandr Kuznetsov for the production design Potterton had audaciously pilfered from Aybolit-66. Kuznetsov, back in the Soviet Union, reportedly learned that he’d won an award for a Canadian movie (about... animated hippie chimps) he had never even heard of.

And then Tiki Tiki more or less vanished into the haze of counterculture animation legend and the dusty annals of bizarro Canadian film history.

But now! 55 years after it first escaped into the world, Tiki Tiki has come shambling back in a beautiful, brand-new 4K restoration from the original 35mm A/B negatives by Canadian International Pictures, with funding from Telefilm Canada. Scruffy, funny, languid, aggressively inexplicable, bursting with handmade invention, and, indeed, suitable for kids and stoned teenagers of all ages, it’s the kind of movie that makes you wonder at its own existence, puzzle over how a thing like this ever got made, marvel that anyone ever looked at this and said “yes!”, and thank your lucky stars that there was once a time where somewhere, somehow, someone did.
Dir. Gerald Potterton, 1971, 71 mins, Canada, English, Unrated (All Audiences), Digital.

Tickets: $12 (All Screenings Are In Person Only)

Please email events@prs.org or phone 323-663-2167 with any questions.