I’ve always thought of Eugene Ionesco’s 1959 play Rhinoceros as a sort of psychic negative of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. The TV Guide summary of this Theater of the Absurd play goes as follows: Everyone in a town turns into rhinos, except one man who chooses to remain human. If the message is a little too ‘on the nose’ for contemporary taste, the humor more than makes up for it. Gene Wilder did a great job drawing that out, along with the profound sense of isolation that permeates the work, in a 1974 film version of the play. Recently however, I ran across this animated 1965 Polish version on the Internet Archive that just rocked my world. If there’s one animated foreign short from the 60’s that will convince you to not become an ideological stooge, this is it. (ed. note: a clip of the 1965 Polish version of Rhinoceros is embedded below. The original is (obviously) not set to a Brian Jonestown Massacre song, but this one is. Radical!)
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