SXSW 2011: GEORGE THE HEDGEHOG (JEZ JERZY) Review

George doesn't need much to be happy. His skateboard is a good place to start. A cold beer is always good. a naked breast or two is fantastic, particularly if it happens to belong to his grade school sweetheart. Sure, she's married to someone else already but that's a relatively minor detail to stand in the way of love or mutual lust.

George has it pretty good, really. Except, of course, that he's not actually human. George is a hedgehog. A talking, drinking, screwing hedgehog in a world of humans. that bit's a bit odd. The real pain in the ass, though, are the mad scientist with his plans for fame and vindication through cloning, the scientist's assistant with plans for riches by making the eventual clone an inline superstar and belief that a hedgehog is the perfect test subject, and the two neo-Nazi skinheads the scientific duo hire to procure their needed source DNA while eliminating the donor. Those guys are irritating. And then there's the eventual clone ... a raving, drooling lunatic with a tenth George's intelligence and ten times the libido. He is, of course, a huge hit with the YouTube masses. What's the spiny little guy to do?

Based on a hugely popular underground comic, George The Hedgehog - Jez Jerzy in the original language - is a raucous and enormously vulgar piece of animated satire. Though the energy level dips and sags in places it is, on the whole, a frequently jaw dropping explosion of pure, juvenile id on screen where you can never quite be sure what's coming next. Comparisons to South Park and the raunchier titles in the adultswim lineup will abound and many will even be accurate, though George has an animation style and a spirit all its own.

Though it dresses things up in the coarsest possible terms George is actually a fairly pointed piece of social satire, a sharp poke in the eye to such obvious issues as the stupidity of there even being a neo-Nazi movement in a nation that was occupied and devastated by the original batch and the obvious banality of online media. The fact that George's creators find such rampant stupidity in the populace funny makes their criticism of it no less accurate.

Getting beyond South Park - a show that similarly revels in what it mocks - a more accurate comparison is the recent brilliant but woefully under-seen Hungarian animated feature The District, which dressed up its jabs at Hungary's racial tensions and US foreign policy as a raunchy, time hopping, hip hop riff on Romeo and Juliet.

Here's the thing about George. He's got some pacing issues. He's got some jokes that don't translate to the local culture and dips into some issues that we may not recognize on these shores. But warts and all he's still pretty damn entertaining. Whether you want to get into the underlying issues or just have a giggle at the sight of an swarm of sex dolls floating through the sky doesn't much matter. George has got you covered either way.