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A Weird and Wicked Buddy Imagines the Dark Fringes of Children’s Entertainment

If you’re a certain age and certain breed of millennial, you may remember a short film broadcast on Adult Swim in 2014 that afterwards went viral called Too Many Cooks. It was a fantastic, hilarious, deeply disturbing and surreal parody of cheesy and saccharine TV intros of the 1980s, that becomes more deranged the further along it goes. One of the notable aspects of the short is characters becoming aware that they are trapped within a rigid and (deceptively) wholesome media reality, and it is that theme that its director Casper Kelly brought with him to his feature debut Buddy, which essentially plays the same gimmick but against the context of vaguely ‘90s children’s television.
Kelly is not the first person to conjure up a dark interpretation of children’s media (hell Robot Chicken was doing it on Adult Swim long before even Too Many Cooks came around). Many adult millennials have joked over the years about how freaky in retrospect things like Teletubbies, Barney & Friends, and Bananas in Pyjamas were. Those costumed characters and artificial worlds removed from the innocent eyes of a child can appear quite eerie and unsettling. Perhaps on account of his being a dinosaur and constantly surrounded by kids, Barney got hit with this a lot. He is quite clearly the model for Buddy, but if this were merely just a variation on the ‘children’s TV but dark’ conceit, it would be just a gimmick. Buddy, to its great credit and eventually its mild detriment, is not just a gimmick.
Without preamble, the film immediately immerses its audience in an episode of It's Buddy!, ostensibly an educational children's show in which four kids live in a tiny neighbourhood learning lessons about kindness, responsibility, and courage with the help of an orange unicorn toy called Buddy who comes to life when they call his name. There are songs and dances and a collection of secondary characters -a couple humans and some anthropomorphized objects such as a backpack and a mailbox. Each episode ends with the kids learning a lesson and hugging Buddy while singing his own theme song. Voiced by Keegan-Michael Key, Buddy initially appears friendly and buoyant, but then Freddy (Delaney Quinn) notices one of the other kids has disappeared and begins to suspect Buddy when the missing boy's book is found in the trash soaked in blood.
The first act is entirely set within this reality, complete with opening titles and closing credits, and Kelly wrings a lot of fun out of acutely harnessing and subsequently subverting the atmosphere and aesthetics of children's television. The playhouse sets, the middling lesson songs, the goofily earnest cheery attitudes of the children -it's all there and all played with twisted satire. Of course it spares no time in revealing Buddy's true nature. Before the end of the first act, his homicidal tendencies are made clear to the kids, built to through some genuinely palpable suspense and an eerie atmosphere of paranoia, as the kids are never sure when they are free to speak openly without Buddy, who seems to be in control of this dimension, overhearing them. 
Kelly threads the needle very well of illustrating a genuinely freaky scenario while never straying far from the amusing irony of the context. It is darkly amusing to see Buddy rip off the face of a felt train character, a horrifically gruesome act for the children, or knock someone's head repeatedly against a kitchen sink -the fluffy orange mascot costume an absurdity, and yet the dead expression and surprisingly menacing tenor of Key's vocal performance makes for an unsettling combination And there are a few actions and implications around Buddy, a creature consumed by a pathological need to be loved, that bring additional layers of creepiness. More than any of that stuff though is the fact of the kids being kids -small and vulnerable and with no responsible adults in sight makes their situation and Buddy's threats all the more intense.
But the film's surreality is not just in the horror makeover of children's television, but in the character of other corners of this reality and the warped sense of humour pervading even the kids, whose performances are very much parodies of child acting in these kinds of productions. Quinn in particular does an astounding job at that while shouldering much of the film’s tension and anxiety, though Tristan Borders, Madison Skyy Polan, and Caleb Williams deserve their laurels as well at hitting just the right note of manufactured TV kid innocence and an aware sense of sarcasm to some very bizarre beats they wind up contending with, particularly on their journey to Diamond City -a chapter of the film where they are separated from Buddy and on a very Wizard of Oz style quest to this mythic Utopia in their world and encounter other deranged characteristics and characters of this deceptively family-friendly environment.
The one section of the film that appears to be genuinely foreign territory to Kelly is a second act set in the real world with its own narrative that eventually ties into the story around Buddy. It introduces Grace, played by Cristin Milioti, who gradually becomes more convinced that a spirit is haunting her home and that she had a child who has been erased from her family’s memories -something dismissed as absurd and disturbing by her husband Ben (Topher Grace). A tonal buffer zone that Kelly manages to navigate competently, it connects a bridge between Buddy’s reality and ours and introduces into the film another human element with greater gravity -namely a mother’s search for her child, which Milioti plays with a sterling conviction that elevates both the stakes and the movie’s empathetic engagement beyond what anyone would reasonably expect of a film this absurd.
And that comes around to hurting the movie ultimately in its last act, where the morbidly humourous chaos reaches new heights. There is still some disturbing creativity at work -especially in Buddy's solution to fitting into a space he is too big for- but by that time the movie's aesthetic novelty has run its course while some real investment has been built up for the characters and their escape from this devilish circumstance. Yet Kelly's resolution has not caught up to that and the result is a handful of shock value choices (and one in particular) that feel rather empty and mean-spirited -and the ending itself is so swift and uninterested in reconciling with those choices for good or ill. In fact its primary function is as one last darkly humourous punchline to a joke the audience probably never considered.
The movie does consistently maintain its weirdness though, even as it leaves you feeling a little hollow. Kelly has a great deal of fun with the radical contrasts of the film and Buddy may well change the way anybody looks at those kinds of children's programs again (relatively rare though I believe they are in this day and age). It strikes a good balance between its dark and genuinely unsettling facets and the wildly funny contexts against which those are framed -with only that middle portion in the real world being an outlier, albeit doing much to inject real drama into the premise. For those who remember Too Many Cooks, it is more or less exactly what you might expect for a feature from the same creator. And though perhaps it might feel a little tighter as a mere sketch, it sustains its creative weirdness much longer than expected, due to the absurd dedication of everyone involved. A wickedly enjoyable and perverse pastiche, one of the strangest things you'll see on a screen this year.

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