Arriving somewhere between South Park’s unhinged cynicism and a slightly silly Don Hertzfeldt philosophy lesson; the Adult-Swim styled “The Ballad of Straw-Hat Sam” throws all rationality out of the window. The partly animated film which uses badly drawn stick figures on an adventure does not follow genre conventions or conventions of its own making. The result is a cute, 45-minute-long trip that has all the making of a future cult classic.Â
Directed by Duke Ross, the low-budget comedy begins at a roadside diner. Straw-Hat Sam (voiced by Ross himself) is casually sitting in one of the booths with his namesake hat on when he randomly tells the waitress what he is going to do with his day. Like most things in the narrative, the randomness of the interaction is topped by the very next scene where Sam kills a fellow in cold blood.Â
Now, Sam is out and about to find the world’s best bottle of bourbon: The Angel’s Teat, and like most adventures, this one can’t be him going all alone on the journey. So, on his way there, he stumbles on a struggling writer who he names Bucket (because he dons a hat that makes it look like a bucket is there on his head) and the two embark on an epic adventure like no other.Â
Their journey is an arduous one that involves fighting off a crab-clawed woman, two nomadic sisters who are also looking for the same elixir-like drink, and a dictator red panda. There’s also the 100 drops of LSD that they take by accident, a set of noir-obsessed detectives who are strangely in life-action with at least one of them extremely horney and submissive and other wonky-ass characters that keep throwing one conflict after other in their way.Â
“The Ballad of Straw-Hat Sam” mashes multiple genres into one. Occasionally it is a western, mostly it feels like a macabre road trip and sometimes it’s just a straight-up stoner comedy that does not care where it’s leading or how it wants to get there. Duke Ross and his team of writers are having a gala time writing something so silly that it almost feels like a win. Not all the jokes land, but one has to laud the team for allowing their inner child and demon to come out to play. The sound design is on point and I liked Ross did not re-touch his voice just because he had a cold. Â
Referencing, Dadism – the kind of art forms that reject all conventions to become something truly bizarre and one of a kind, Ross’ film writes its own rules and doesn’t stick to them. There is no grander takeaway here, except maybe, the meta-commentary that rejecting all sets of rules is the only way forward. If you truly want your art to speak your language, you have to get those friends on board and unleash the child in you.Â
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