Feature: The Bunny & The Bull
Wednesday, 7th October 2009
Released late next month, The Bunny & The Bull is a feature length surreal comedy road-trip from Warp X Films and the makers of the The Mighty Boosh.
Spanish passions fed into the eclectic score by Ralfe Band, whose front man Oly Ralfe contributed occasional songs and cameos to ‘The Mighty Boosh’s’ radio and TV shows. (His music is described by Julian Barratt as ‘psychopathic folk-waltz music… epic and peculiar and catchy as hell’.)‘The film seems to have very much an internal world,’ considers Ralfe, ‘so I tried to create quite a self-contained soundtrack. The music was meant to have a magical, unreal quality, exactly like the film itself. At first they were thinking of using a couple of tracks by Tom Waits, whom I love, but I heard them and said "No, this doesn’t work," because it’s referencing the outside world and characters you know who will distract you. My first instincts were usually the ones that worked.’Piano sounds feature heavily. ‘There’s a kind of dusty, archaic kind of look to some of the film which suited an old piano sound,’ says Ralfe. ‘We had this old, broken American piano in the room we were recording in, and we ended up just banging and clacking this broken old beast to create some of the atmospheric, darker kind of sounds. And I recorded this melodic feel on another piano. Then there are more folky elements on accordion when they’re in Spain. It’s a road trip, and our music has quite a lot of different ingredients, so we were able to draw on that depending on where they were in Europe, in Spain or Poland or back in Britain.’
Bunny & the Bull is a road movie set entirely in a flat. Stephen Turnbull hasn’t been outside in months. Living with a painfully restrictive routine, he refuses to interact with the world or think about the past. When a sudden infestation of mice forces him to change his ways, he finds his mind hurtling back to the disastrous trek around Europe he undertook with his friend Bunny, a womanising, gambling-addicted booze-hound. Unable to stem the flood of memories, Stephen’s flat becomes the springboard for an extraordinary odyssey through landscapes made up of snapshots and souvenirs, from the industrial wastelands of Silesia to the bull fields of Andalusia. A story of love, disillusionment, stuffed bears and globalised seafood, Bunny & the Bull is an offbeat and heartfelt journey to the end of the room.Watch Julian Barratt drink milk fresh from a dog in this exclusive clip. The film is released across the UK on November 27