One of the most wonderful things about animation is its ability to make metaphors physical. In the Bettie Boop short “Minnie the Moocher,” for example, Bettie’s father is giving her a lecture because she’s not eating her dinner. As she tiredly gazes on him, his head transforms into a phonograph, and the scratchy, static sound that comes out is incomprehensible. Before her eyes, he has turned into a literal broken record. Of course, her mom then changes the record to something more festive and begins to tap her foot to the music. Animations play with reality to make the implicit visible; part of the joy is making those connections between traditionally metaphorical language and the images we see.
Icky is similar to the Fleischer brothers’ classic short, not only because heads change shape but also because it rests on creating meaning through actualizing metaphors. In the short film, people have regular human bodies but their heads are literal puzzles (in this case Rubik’s Cubes). A child is born with her puzzle incomplete. While all the other heads have tiles that match on each side, this child’s head puzzle is a mess—none of the colored tiles or sides is “solved.” In fact, when the child’s mother attempts to right the sides, they keep on reverting to their unsolved state. This renders the child an outsider, isolated from her fellow puzzleheads. She even goes to doctors and therapists to attempt to treat her unsolved nature. While waiting for a bus in the rain, however, she looks down at a puddle to see various colors dripping into the drain. She looks up to find another person whose head is also unsolved—it seems as the man had painted normalcy over it.
Perhaps a metaphor for LGBTQ identity developmental disability or mental illness, the film speaks to the challenges of being a visible outsider. Its lack of dialogue and strong visuals create a simple yet universal theme—that of wanting to know if they are okay, even if they move through the world differently than others. Although it doesn’t exactly move on to new ground thematically, director Parastoo Cardgar’s elegant drawings and simple message give it a universal charisma that makes it a pleasure to watch.