“If to animate an object is to give it life, to cartoon the same object is to play roulette with that life, for entertainment value.”
“As a live-action film with a cartoon sensibility, Fury Road is notable for transferring not only the rule-bound integrity of the cartoon genre onto fleshy heroes and heroines, but also the physics and bodily elasticity. Just as the animated body can stretch and recoil to absorb the impact of dizzying attacks, in Miller’s film human forms are endowed with the plasticity of cartoon characters. This renders them impervious to harm, which of course means that the film throws as much harm at them as possible — extreme durability is met with extreme violence. The film’s animated texture empowers many of its characters to survive explosions, shoddy blood transfusions, and other potentially lethal obstacles. They spray-paint, brand, and pigment their skin as if it were cel paper. They catapult themselves through the air using an endlessly regenerating supply of whacked-out combat tools à la ACME corporation: vaulting poles, cool knives, guns, surprise guns, and backup surprise guns.”
“If to cartoon a body is to subject it to endlessly multiplying obstacles and inconveniences for the viewer’s entertainment, to cartoon is also to objectify — to make the body just live-looking enough for the audience to want it to survive, but not for us to particularly understand it or mourn its loss should it not.”
“Draped in swathes of diaphanous cheesecloth, the wives are introduced by a prolonged scene in which they bathe by a spigot, as if participating in a wet T-shirt contest. Miller’s choice to cast well-known supermodels to play the wives also associates many of the female presences onscreen with their two-dimensional images in glossy magazine ads and billboards. Though Rosie Huntington-Whiteley — the most prominent wife — has already graced screens big and small in Michael Bay’s Transformers and Victoria’s Secret ads, her role in Mad Max: Fury Road does little to complicate her previous representations as a body that, though fleshy and corporeal, is never quite human.”
“Part of the overwhelmingly enthusiastic response to Fury Road as a work of aesthetic and political significance must be rooted in our collective desire to expect more from the desiccated corporate snoozefest that the action flick genre has become.”
“But these elements alone do not explain the sheer sense of relief and surprise that has colored Mad Max’s reception. Perhaps most importantly, unlike Superman and Batman, Mad Max and Imperator Furiosa are so welcome because they do justice to the necessary sense of fun built into their comic roots. As relative no-names reborn from a forgotten Australian series, they are unburdened by the deadening gravitas that plagues the summer blockbuster superhero. They bounce and swerve in unexpected ways. At times, they even make us laugh. Ultimately, what critics talk about when they talk about Chuck Jones is his ability to entertain, and George Miller’s savvy to the movie magic locked in cartoon formulas is at the heart of Fury Road’s appeal. At best, Fury Road’s success may reveal the potential of animation conventions to expand the horizons of action flick worlds, in all their frantic magnificence, their lurches and skids.”