The filmmaker behind twisted sitcom parody “Too Many Cooks” is back with another dark voyage into the absurd underbelly of familiar television fare: Buddy.
Writer/Director Casper Kelly takes aim at kids’ shows, blending Barney with Pee-Wee, with a dash of Howdy Doody and Dora the Explorer, in a horror-comedy with a cuddly but murderous mascot.
“The end for me was the idea of living in the world of the show,” Kelly tells Bloody Disgusting at the Sundance premiere. “As a child, I would watch a show and think they lived in that world. I would think about things like, how come we never see the bathrooms? Where do they sleep? What happens if they don’t want to do the storyline that day? Are they forced to do it? You know what I mean? I thought that was life. That becomes a metaphor for other things in our lives.”
Buddy employs a unique structure designed to place viewers directly in the unsettling but seemingly wholesome set of the mascot’s television series. So much so that it maintains a wholesome facade, only revealing the cracks slowly.
Kelly strikes a delicate balance, not tipping the scales too far into absurdity too early. The filmmaker established this with one key rule: “Don’t make it satirical. Play it as straight as humanly possible. There was an earlier incarnation of Buddy where his eyes looked crazy, like he looked like a crazy person. I’m like, ‘No. He needs to look comforting, just like a real show.’ If you’re going to have a show and then start messing with it, I, personally, that’s my taste, is play it very straight of what the show, a real show.”
As for Buddy himself, it took a talented crew to bring him to life on screen. Three mascot suits, many of which get put through the bloody wringer here, inhabited by suit actor Sergey Zhuravsky.
Kelly has endless praise for Zhuravsky’s physical performance, and looked to one beloved kids’ show, in particular, as an example when addressing Buddy’s dialogue.
Barney & Friends inspired Casper Kelly’s Buddy
“One of the puppeteers was a huge Barney fan, huge, and knew all the Barney lore and knew all the people that worked on Barney,” Kelly said. “We’re like, ‘How does this even work?’ So, how it would work, and it’s how we did it, was there was a voice not in the suit, a voice actor off camera, and then someone else doing a remote control of the mouth. That allows the suit actor to listen and act, too, because it’s very hard, because you cannot see a lot. All you can see is out of the mouth, which is not much. It allows him to focus on just the physical acting,”
Kelly continued, “He did it like that. Then Keegan-Michael Key, who was delightful and brought a whole new layer to it, came in after we shot and edited it, because it just wouldn’t have worked out schedule-wise for him to be there for 25 days. We had the puppeteers, I think Cedwan [Hooks] and his wife, Jamica, who are both puppeteers here in Atlanta, would voice it. They did a great job. I love puppets and the puppet community.”
It’s not a spoiler to say that Buddy is a stickler for rules and doesn’t take kindly to those who ignore or break them. That puts the kids trapped on his show in harm’s way, and Kelly isn’t afraid to raise the stakes or play with taboos.
But the filmmaker did heavily consider how much to actually show Buddy’s violence. The filmmaker revealed, “We did shoot a little that we decided not to show. We wanted to get just the right emotion at the right time. A good example is animals. My wife, if she sees something where a dog’s getting hurt, she’s like, ‘I’m out,’ so we didn’t want that. But yeah, the kids enjoyed it. They knew it was pretend, and they had fun.”
Buddy is currently screening at the Sundance Film Festival. Stay tuned for acquisition and release details as they arrive.