For reasons I don’t really want to go into, I watched an episode of South Park the other night.  It was one from 2004, a response to “The Passion of the Christ” called “The Passion of the Jew,” a gleeful skewering of the movie, its director, and the passions (religious and political) they stirred up.  What pleased me most was how happily scrambled the graphics are.  They combine elements of cartoon, collage, drafting, film and photography, to create bold, aspatial imagery.

As the story goes, Stan and Kenny sneak into the movie, don’t like it, and visit Mel Gibson in Malibu to get their $18 back.  His house is depicted in crude perspectives, a Spanish-style pleasure palace with a tile roof, a circular driveway, and a fountain with lions spewing water from their mouths.  Inside it’s done up minimally, with white walls, not enough furniture, and bad modern art.  Stan and Kenny are depicted as they always are, construction paper cut-outs, and Mel is depicted, at twice their size, Simpsons-style, with paparazzi photographs for his head.  Over the seasons South Park has incorporated increasingly sophisticated computer-generated animations.  So the graphics have gotten sharper, and the backgrounds more fanciful.  But this episode, a relatively early one, has a nice thrown-together feeling.  The passages when Mel is talking (and singing, and leaping across the room) go beyond comedy.  They’re graceful, manic, and surreal.