I suspect that it might be John Carpenter’s fault.
Prince of Darkness was certainly one of the first times it happened, but by now it has been done so many times that it has become a cliché: in the movies, “Quantum Mechanics” means “weird.” It gets invoked to explain whatever lunatic thing is happening in your plot, and all too often one would be hard pressed to identify anything remotely like actual science.
As a result, any film that presents a theory of quantum mechanics — even its own version of quantum mechanics — and follows it logically through the course of its story is a rarity.
Which brings us to Quantum Cowboys.
Geoff Marslett first came to my attention with an incredible little animated film called Mars. It’s a sweet little romance with a goofy and rather satiric trip to Mars wrapped around it; a space flight to Mars at a time when the space program is all about advertising and the big hero is a creation of all his publicity. Geoff used a computerized rotoscoped style, similar to that Richard Linklater used in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, although it had a quirky and deliberately simplified style that was all its own.
But this time around he’s produced something stranger and even quirkier, a trippy, quantum mechanics -driven story involving time travel, alternate timelines, choices, and, yes, cowboys.
And, what’s more, he used a patchwork quilt of radically different animation styles (the trailers claimed 12 different styles, but who’s counting?) — and he even has a perfectly logical reason for this in the story itself.
It all starts with some familiar ideas taken from Quantum Physics: each new decision creates a new, branching universe, one in which that alternate possibility plays out.
However, quantum reality is also dependent on the observer. Things literally do not exist unless they have been observed.
So we have a mysterious figure who has the job of taking all the memories people have and stitching them together into one reality.
However, no one sees the universe in quite the same way, and their memories can be unreliable, so these memories can look quite different from each other.
So different that they look like they were animated in an entirely different style.
Back in the Old West, Frank and Bruno have wandered into a new town where they got jobs as street cleaners. But Frank decides he’d rather rob a local hardware store, and when he’s caught, a singer named Blackie gets shot, and Frank ends up in jail.
When he finally gets out of jail, however, he insists that Blackie is still alive and goes off in search of him with the help of Bruno and Linde, a Native American woman who is willing to help them — if they help her with her problem.
And, although Bruno and Linde do not realize this, Frank’s insistence that Blackie is alive has made his death an indeterminate event.
You know, like Schrödinger’s cat.
Meanwhile, two time travelers are on their trail (at least when they aren’t trying to figure out how they can cash in on the Led Zeppelin songs they remember) and plan to stop them no matter how many alternate times it takes.
Then there is the mysterious preacher, Fr. John Kino, who may or may not have been brought into existence by Frank’s quest, and a camera crew from the present, who are trying to film these past events and fix them as reality.
Although it is actually rather stranger than this.
Somehow, the dazzling collection of animation styles suits this strange and unconventional narrative very well: it ranges from a few shots which may actually be live action, to scratchy sketches, outlines, cut outs, simplified and bold drawings, a few bits of stop motion, and whatever else Geoff could come up with. I particularly liked the stop motion animation which was used in the scenes featuring the old man editing reality: the maquette’s eyes and mouth have been cut out from a printed photograph of the actor and posted on its face, a frame of film at a time. This makes it very expressive — and yet at the same time is decidedly eerie and unearthly.
Although, to be fair, the way his stop motion pet cat is animated is even stranger.
A large part of the fun are the quirky details dropped casually into the story, like the bottle that keeps hitting Frank, or the time travelers schemes for making money. And just how did that zebra get in there? (Yeah, yeah, I know it’s a horse with stripes painted on it. Pretend you don’t notice. Maybe it is your observation that is the unreliable one that will be edited out).
Geoff Marslett populated this world with a handful of interesting nearly familiar faces, including David Arquette, Gary Farmer, John Doe, and the director of Repo Man himself, Alex Cox (who seems to do more cameos than anything else these days). The legendary French actress Anna Karina makes a cameo courtesy of stock footage, and you can even spot Geoff himself as the cameraman for the present-day film crew. I was also a bit amused to see actor, stuntman and director Mark Stephen Grove (who created the film Star Raiders) in a bit part.
Now some of you may have heard of this film as The Boardinghouse Reach, which was Geoff’s original title, and are probably puzzled by the phrase. It does get used a few times throughout the film by one of the two bounty hunters, but isn’t really explained. I’m not sure there are many boarding houses left these days, but the basic idea was that the boarding house served up three meals a day, family style, in a common dining room.
Which meant that, if you wanted that extra pork chop, you had to have a long, fast reach — and a lot of sheer nerve — to get there ahead of all the other boarders.
Certainly it is a title that is as quirky as the film itself, even if it doesn’t necessarily fit very well. And you have to admit that Quantum Cowboys does give you a slightly better idea of what to expect from the film.
Not that anything really could.
Quantum Cowboys is a brilliant film: strange; unexpected; finding odd new paths to explore; and boldly going where no animated film has dared go before. But, at the same time, it is funny, entertaining and a joy to watch. It may toy with some heavy ideas, but it does so playfully, and with a lot of style. It is that rare film, which will surely please the sort of exclusive art house audience it is aimed at, but at the same time also appeal to the average filmgoers fortunate enough to see it.
All this and a great soundtrack, too!
So, yes, I’m not even going to pretend to be impartial: watch this film. It’s great. It’s different.
And it’s a lot of fun…
rivets on the poster 
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