Review: Animals “Stuff”

Stuff it in.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

When a mysterious orb gobbles up a few random pieces of stuff lying around, they come to life and are given a 24-hour lease on life. Most of them take on the name of “Mike”, including a baseball, a toaster, a receipt, a VHS cassette of Can’t Hardly Wait, and a dirty shoe. One of the items, a FleshLight, decides to go punk rock and call himself “Phil”. Right away controversy ensues when the baseball and the VHS cassette get married and Phil goes down a path of turmoil that nearly sees him take his own life, but is able to be talked down off the ledge. It hardly matters though, because the entire lineup of characters is turned back into inanimate objects with the exception of the receipt which is able to somehow thwart any changes along with building a device that unites all of the animals in NYC.

Our Take

God damn, this season is so good. Producers Phil Matarese and Mike Luciano should be commended for doing a better job of thinking outside of the sandbox, but not too far out (see “Humans”) and as a result, the boys are still discovering the minutia of storytelling and delivery in a live-action setting, however are getting far more sophisticated in an animated setting. This week’s episode flies in the face of the normal Animals conventions…fully animated characters, complete with posable digits and mouth frames, in place of our normal lovable animal characters that are usually presented far more simple.

The cast this week is a knockout. Tracy Morgan’s toaster is excellent, Aisha Tyler (shoe), Natasha Lyonne (tape), and the creators do a bang up job of taking advantage of equal screen time that never goes to waste. Last, but not least, Anthony Mackie’s “receipt” appears to be continuing a theme of this season providing a much more dynamic infrastructure of story arcs that aren’t deliberate like a Netflix series would be, but satiable and well thought out. The live action bits can be a bit contrived, and really you’re better off just fast-forwarding on your DVR to the animated portion of the episode, but Animals season three is turning out to be Mike and Phil’s best work yet. With episodes like this, “Wallet”, and a preview of things to come, we could have something special on our hands here.