Creature Comforts: Self Image, Wingin' It, and Art

With its second episode, Creature Comforts continued to showcase its unique format (using excerpts from real person interviews and placing them in the mouths of a wide variety of animated animals) and provided me with another half hour of fun, easy-going summer viewing.

The episode was again divided into three segments, each dedicated to a certain topic. The first topic, "Self-Image," found animals as varied as cats and condors, owls and rabbits talking about their appearance and the appearance of others. At the top of the show, a male cat considered himself a ten on the good-looks scale, while his female companion said she didn't think anyone could think of themselves as a ten except Sean Connery. "Of course, these days, not so much anymore." Another highlight of this segment included a fly caught in a spider's web, each saying the other looked good-- the fly as a device to charm his way out of the spider's grasp, the spider referencing how good the fly looked to eat. Of course, the real charm of this situation comes from the fact that when the human voices were making these statements they were simply complimenting each other, not concerned about where they fell in the food chain.

In the second segment of this episode, I quickly forgot that the dialogue was coming from off-the-cuff remarks made by humans and simply allowed myself to believe these were the words of the animals that were talking. This was made very easy by the perfect stop-motion animation of the characters as well as the pairing of characters to topic, specifically birds talking about flying. There were a number of very funny moments in the "Wingin' It" segment that almost had me thinking this was scripted television. Those scenes included the one-legged, arm-in-a-sling cardinal talking about performing aerial tricks and how any landing you walk away from is a good one. The cardinal then proceeded to fall off of his perch. Another standout was the baby bald eagles (voiced by children) talking about how scary flying is and how one shouldn't look down when soaring at such great heights. The biggest laugh of the episode came from the penguin attempting to describe how birds fly, pseudo-scientifically talking about how the air flows above and below their wings and it's their constant flapping that keeps them in flight. "I don't know. That's just me assuming."

The last segment, simply entitled "Art," highlighted how the choice of setting, not just the choice of animal, added to the comedic effect of relaying these interviews. The dogs talking about how much they enjoyed art were not just dogs, they were dogs playing poker! The flies talking about pop art were wisely placed on top of a soup can, a la Andy Warhol's famous print. The program also represented two women fawning so sincerely over what makes great art as two pigeons resting on a statue… that they eventually pooped on. The dogs, flies and pigeons could literally have been situated anywhere in this animated world, but Creature Comforts is proving it's a much smarter show than that.