Buddy will be released in theaters on Friday, August 28.
It’s hard to overstate just how subversive and incredible Too Many Cooks was when it aired with zero warning/zero fanfare in the dead of night on Adult Swim in 2014. In 11 minutes, director Casper Kelly staged what starts as a send-up of ’80s and ’90s multicam sitcom intros, but rapidly devolves into a medium-breaking, surrealist nightmare. Though Kelly carried that bait-and-switch energy into 2021’s feature-length “Adult Swim Yule Log,” it’s Buddy that feels like the true spiritual successor to Too Many Cooks. Initially presenting as an episode of a lost children’s enrichment program in the vein of Barney & Friends, Buddy similarly uses the saccharine trappings of that medium as a delivery system for an edgy, clever descent into madness.
Before the earworm theme song which opens Buddy is even done, the film’s 1990s-appropriate 4:3 aspect ratio, soundstage-style camera coverage, and cheery aesthetic all wonderfully establish the bounds of its kids show form. Buddy the Unicorn (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) dopily dotes on the kids that spend all their time at the clubhouse and, along with other anthropomorphized objects, teaches them lessons about dancing or how to responsibly use household cleaning products. The episode ends, the credits roll, and life begins anew the next day. It’s a cycle that, as the kids come to realize, obfuscates more malicious intentions on Buddy’s part. The film’s first act is squarely-focused on reinforcing the slipping of the rose-tinted glasses with which the kids see the world, and Keegan-Michael Key’s vocal performance of the orange unicorn reinforces those tonal shifts well. Key is adept at modulating the lovey-dovey musicality of Buddy’s voice with hints of danger that don’t make things too sinister too quickly, so that when there are bursts of violence early on, they do feel surprising and gnarly.
Buddy wastes no time revealing its central conceit and how it plans to push that forward. One of the kids tires of Buddy pretty much immediately, and the fallout of that slight attracts the curiosity of Freddy (Delaney Quinn), another kid in Buddy’s thrall. Quinn’s performance, like Key’s, is impressive in its control, never getting ahead of where Kelly has pitched the tone at any given point. The rest of the kids who make up Buddy’s gang get the occasional chance to shine, but Freddy’s the only one who really has space to develop her character past a caricature of “kid with fewer lines than the others in an episode of Barney.”
Tone really is the highlight of Buddy: the undercurrent of wickedness which roils into view more and more as the movie goes is very well-managed, and no doubt Kelly’s signature strength. Too Many Cooks has inspired countless imitations in the 12 years since its release, but Buddy proves that Kelly is at the top of his class when it comes to weaponizing smiley, vapid positivity into a dark funhouse of f***ery. The filmmaker revels in revealing more about talking inanimate objects like Strappy (Patton Oswalt), Mr. Mailbox (Eric Bauza), Charlie the Train (Michael Shannon), and to what degree they’re able to see past Buddy’s smokescreen. Oswalt’s Strappy in particular becomes a very enjoyable partner to Freddy and the other kids, and though he never has much dialogue all at once, he makes every line count. Shannon double-dips as a second anthropomorphic character, paired with the movie’s best cameo appearance, in a send-up of a different style of children’s programming that feels especially insane in a movie that already feels especially insane up to that point.
Both Anna Kathleen’s production design and Devon Hawkes Ludlow’s puppet design are real highlights in Buddy, critically important to the movie’s overall success. The primary colors and chunky, cartoonish build quality of the set perfectly thread the needle of Kelly’s obvious inspirations so that no single ingredient in the cosmic gumbo feels too overpowering, which is enough to leave Buddy feeling well-defined enough to stand on its own. Ludlow’s puppet work is multifunctional here and also well-representative of Buddy’s tone, presenting an extremely appealing veneer that has room on the inside for all sorts of viscera and nastiness that’s always satisfying to see spill out into the open. Music is also a huge part of Buddy’s identity, with Kelly’s Too Many Cooks songwriter Shawn Coleman providing sing-songy ditties that feel true to the movie’s lineage and become more important to the experience than you might expect.
Even though the particulars of how Buddy’s mask starts to slip are fun to track, the film’s early adherence to the visual language of children’s shows does wear thin quickly, and pacing does become Buddy’s only significant downfall throughout. That Buddy feels as long as it does even at just 96 minutes is most attributable to how the nature of the story opens doors for the kids to question just why they spend so much time at Buddy’s clubhouse, which in turn leads to them pushing the boundaries of their own existence. The mechanics of how all that fits together gives the movie a stop-and-start quality that leaves the momentum of the full piece lacking. Despite the clarity and strength of the film’s tone being incredibly steady (even if the pacing isn’t), that does draw an outsized amount of attention to the visual inconsistencies that are present. As we the audience watch Buddy, the “home base” look of that fullscreen 4:3 aspect ratio is meant to connote that we’re experiencing the Buddy TV show as reality. But later in the movie, we have cause to see footage from that TV show displayed on widescreen TVs. In those moments, the Buddy TV show is displayed in the more modern 16:9 aspect ratio. This is a nitpick, sure, but the harder a director pushes a high concept like this, the more cohesive small details need to be so as not to break suspension of disbelief. It’s not a major distraction, but creating a world so worthy of close inspection does create a double-edged sword that Kelly occasionally slices himself on.
Buddy’s twists and turns deserve to be preserved as much as possible, but that sense of exhaustion with Buddy’s initial formal identity takes its most interesting turn when Cristin Milioti and Topher Grace’s far-more grounded characters come into play going into act two. When Buddy starts to reveal the shape of where the story is going, Milioti becomes the movie’s MVP. As she becomes aware of Buddy’s true nature, Milioti’s Grace provides the movie with a lot of depth through her skillful, adaptive performance. Her own command of tone is on its strongest display during a truly uncomfortable encounter between her and Buddy, which sees a dark movie go even darker than you may expect. Movies like Five Nights at Freddy’s, Willy’s Wonderland, and Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey have been pushing the stock of “mascot horror” up for years now, but Buddy stands apart in how it calls attention to the dangers of using toxic positivity to distract from darker corners of the day-to-day experience. At a certain point, you do get a really clear sense of where Buddy is going to wind up, but as with life, the journey is the destination here, and Kelly throws more than enough curveballs along the way to keep the somewhat predictable ending from feeling dissatisfying.
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