Tiki Tiki

A producer monkey pitches a fairytale extravaganza to a sceptical financier. A psychedelic meta-comedy that mixes animation with excerpts from a Soviet science-fiction fantasy spectacle. A film trip unlike any before or since.

Imagine you’re a set designer in the Soviet Union, and one day, you receive a letter from Canada announcing that you won the National Film Award for Best Art Direction – for a movie you’ve never heard of! This is exactly what happened to Mosfilm’s Aleksandr Kuznetsov in 1971 when he was lauded for his work, as seen in Gerald Potterton’s Tiki Tiki.

Tiki Tiki is a meta-comedy about a bunch of animated movie-making monkeys whose masterpiece was put together using excerpts from Rolan Bykov’s subversive fairytale musical Aybolit-66 (1967) – which is the film Kuznetsov had actually worked on. 

Potterton, nowadays mainly remembered for Heavy Metal (1981) and his animation work on George Dunning’s Beatles phenomenon Yellow Submarine (1967), already sensed that Tiki Tiki might push a few envelopes too fast and too far – even for this psychedelic era – and was proven right when it was mostly met with puzzlement. Today, Tiki Tiki still looks visionary, tinged with wistful nostalgia for an age of everything goes. What a marvel.

– Olaf Möller

Trailer

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