February & March:

Glasgow Intl. Film Festival - Feb 17th & 21st

Tickets here: http://www.glasgowfilm.org/theatre/whats_on/4700_far_out_isnt_far_enough_the_tomi_ungerer_story

Jameson Dublin Intl. Film Festival - Feb 18th @ 18.15

Tickets here: https://jdiff.ticketsolve.com/shows/873490145/events

Sedona Intl. Film Festival - Feb 28th & March 2nd

Schedule Here: http://www.sedonafilmfestival.org/Page.asp?NavID=162

Cinequest Film Festival, San Jose, CA – Feb 27 @ 9:15pm, March 1 @ 11:45am, March 5th @ 4:30pm

Tickets Here: http://payments.cinequest.org/WebSales/pages/info.aspx?evtinfo=6952~78899376-35a9-4153-8303-e1557be2dc32&epguid=70d8e056-fa45-4221-9cc7-b6dc88f62c98&#.UQ1AtaVnTdk

Miami International Film Festival - March 6th @ 9:30pm at Miami Beach Cinematheque & March 8th @ 7:15pm at Regal Cinemas South Beach

Tickets Here: http://miami.festivalgenius.com/2013/films/faroutisntfarenoughthetomiungererstory_bradbernstein_miami2013

Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story

(Documentary)

By BOYD VAN HOEIJ

A Corner of the Cave Media presentation and production. (International sales: Le Pacte, Paris.) Produced by Brad Bernstein. Executive producers, Chris Laine, Kevin Rich. Co-executive producers, Erik Neandross, Eric Rosee, Reza Taleghani. Co-producer, Rick Cikowski. Directed, written by Brad Bernstein.

Maybe he was strange, but in the 1960s Tomi Ungerer was also a hit. The children’s illustrator and writer from Strasbourg, France made his name in Manhattan, where the force of his talent broke publishers’ rules — for instance, the Miltonian one about how snakes can’t be protagonists. (Meet Crictor, Ungerer’s groundbreaking reptilian hero.)

Then one day, Ungerer went and broke the unbreakable rule, by American standards at least. He published erotic art. Presto, change-o, and also, arrivederci! School libraries dumped his work, reviewers refused to review him, he hightailed it back to Europe, and the overprotected American public lost a genius.

Or at least, so goes the beguiling premise of “Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story.” The feature-length documentary brings the legendary exile back to his adopted home once again, with a U.S. premiere at the DOC NYC film festival in Manhattan this Saturday.

The film’s director, a Miami-based television documentary producer named Brad Bernstein, first came across Ungerer in 2008, by way of a New York Times profile about an alleged tussle some 50 years ago between Ungerer and the FBI. Knowing a character when he saw one, Bernstein wrote a letter to Ungerer asking if he could film him. Ungerer, who now lives atop a cliff in Ireland, did not bite. He had no interest in being misunderstood again. But his daughter and manager Aria (who also runs her 81-year-old father’s Facebook and Twitter accounts) insisted he take a chance.

If the resulting film, pieced together over the past four years, is more loving than dispassionate, it’s hard to blame Bernstein for picking a side. In Ungerer’s care, digression is an art form. He practices it at length in “Far Out,” usually in a way that forces his point. Within the film’s first five minutes, he makes two leaps: that a sheet of paper is akin to a body, and that his calling is to then “rape [it] with my drawing.”

The drawings in question, spare and evocative, are woven through the film by animator Rick Cikowski. Along with unconventional heroes — the green and beady-eyed Crictors of the world — Ungerer plays with conventional villains turned on their head. Adolf Hitler, and the bombings of World War II, which Ungerer witnessed as a young boy, are drawn with the clean strokes of a New Yorker cartoon, a model Ungerer has long been inspired by and whose strict adoption only makes his dark subjects darker.

The famously grumpy Maurice Sendak, who died before the film’s release, also makes an appearance, in a brief but memorable cameo in which he credits Ungerer for inspiring him to create “Where The Wild Things Are.” As far as celebrity endorsements go, there may be no other one to get. (Is there a more recognized children’s illustrator or book in America?)

And yet, though Crictor and the rest are back on U.S. shelves, everything about Ungerer — from his long-limbed, gap-toothed elegance to his cheerful embrace of fetishism — is continental. Europe is where his fans are, where he lives, and where a museum dedicated to his work marks the world’s only such for a living illustrator. The Huffington Post spoke with the octogenarian during the film’s summer debut at the Toronto International Film Festival. He told us how it feels to see his face on the big screen, and to return, in a fashion and for a spell, to the country that never quite accepted him and yet draws him like a needle to “the huge magnet.”

The Huffington Post: How is it to have a film made about you?

Tomi Ungerer: It’s rather strange. In the past, I’ve been very spoiled in Europe with a lot of documentaries. I did four films with Percy Adlon, but they were always on small screens. They were always on television. But I never like to watch myself. I don’t like my voice, my accent. I speak German in a French accent, and French with a German accent and German with a French accent and so on.

Now, watching myself, it’s scary, actually! It’s bigger than life size. But then Brad did such a wonderful job. I’m delighted that he was able to formulate it without anytreason, you know what I mean? Without any twisting. I still wonder, you know, how can you do it? I’m over eighty years old. A whole lifetime, he put into one capsule for an hour and a half, with so much feeling and vibrancy.

HP: Was it comfortable watching it last night with an audience for the first time?

TU: It was really heartwarming. I have no other word. I felt really reassured. I felt that I was among nice people who understood me. Because I’m a pretty kind of scattered person with all the things I do. I can be interpreted in any way.

HP: What interpretations were you afraid of?

TU: I don’t like it when people say that I’m a pornographer. I do erotic art, and I do eroticism in my satire, and that really comes across [in the flim].

HP: You’ve described New York as having a magnetic force on you. Will you be visiting during the film’s festival run?

TU: Right now, I’m just so glad to just get back on the American continent. I’ve loved New York like no other city in my life, and when you’ve loved you always still have a lingering melancholy about getting back. My last trip there was marvelous. I have so many old friends there. But I can’t go so soon after this trip. That will be too hard on me. I have a hard time traveling…though I have turned into a living advertisement for Air Canada. Impeccable, impeccable!

HP: In the film, you talk about how much America fascinated you as a young man.

TU: And how!

HP: Do you think if you were young today and starting out, the country would hold the same appeal to you?

TU: This is a very good question. I suppose I don’t know! I have changed altogether. I change all the time. Nowadays, I don’t have that innocence I had then. When I arrived in America with $60 in my pocket, it was still the McCarthy witch-hunt era, which is how I got into trouble.

HP: What would you say has changed since then?

TU: What really struck me in New York when I was there a year and a half ago was that you don’t feel any racial differences any more. The one language that is spoken is the smile language. You don’t feel these lingering racial frustrations you used to have in the olden days. I feel that’s changed, and it shows that anything can change.

Would you say that children’s literature has evolved as well? Is it a moralizing force in the same way it was when you started illustrating?

I think children will always be children, but on the other hand, the background has changed so much, especially with immigration and people living in other countries. Children are exposed to completely different values. There’s one constant, which is: good or bad. The moral. I think this should be taught in schools more, that what is bad is what is not profitable to anyone.

HP: Any plans to come back?

TU: In 2015, I’m having a big big retrospective at The Drawing Center in New York City. I’ll come for that.

HP: And what’s next?

TU: I just finished a book, which is called “Fog Man.” It’s being published in the spring. It’s my homage to Ireland, the first time I’ve set a book there, and the first time in a children’s book where it’s all atmosphere. But I cannot tell you the whole story. You have to wait for that one.

By Ricky Lima – September 20th, 2012

I think my love of illustration and animation is well documented here on Thumbs – I like to think of myself as an animation connoisseur of sorts. So it was with great excitement that I went to a screening ofFar Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story. Before I attended the screening, the name Ungerer was unfamiliar to me. When I looked up his work it became clear that his illustration style was a huge part of my childhood. His illustrations are like a mix of classic New Yorker strips and Rocky and Bullwinkle. Ungerer’s work has influenced a great deal of children’s books such as Where the Wild Thing Are; this film delves into the life of the man that created books such as The Three Robbers, and Moon Man.

The film began with a look at his childhood in Nazi Germany. He was born near the boarder of France and Germany in the Alsace region. The interesting thing about this region is that throughout history, ownership of the region shifted between Germany and France several times. During World War II the Alsace region was German territory and Ungerer admits to being incredibly influenced by the powerful imagery that Nazi propaganda posters had. Later in his life he would use the same techniques that he saw in Germany in his own more subversive works.
What is Tomi about to say? WHAT?

At the age of twenty-five, Ungerer moved to New York to start a new life as his German accent wasn’t welcome in the Alsace region after the war. He began working in marketing as an illustrator and was allowed to explore his style in that medium. It wasn’t until later -after a chance meeting with a publisher- that Ungerer began to work on children’s novels. He had quite a bit of success in the genre because of his interesting subject matter. One story in particular that garnered a lot of attention was Crictor, which was about an old lady with a pet boa constrictor. This particular book netted so much interest due to the unconventional pet the lady had. Most children’s books of the time dealt with very cuddly characters and very safe ones; painting a boa constrictor in a positive light was very new and different in children’s literature in the 50′s and Ungerer’s book won many awards.

Later in his career, Ungerer became very disillusioned with society (especially when it came to racial segregation). He began to create posters railing against the government and their treatment of their own people. This was when the latent influence of Nazi propaganda really began to surface in his works. He used much of the same imagery (and symbols) that the Nazi’s used as an effective way to get his point across. His pieces during that period have been highly praised as being great works of political dissent. It was also during this time that Ungerer began to delve into the world of S&M and began to explore himself as a sexual being. During that time he published an erotic art book titled Fornicon, which was an underground hit. Ungerer was able to keep his childrens’ novels and his erotica in two separate worlds until a conference on children’s literature in which an attendee questioned Ungerer about his work in erotica. With this knowledge in the public eye, all of Ungerer’s work was banned from American libraries and he was essentially excommunicated from the childrens’ publishing world. He left New York and stopped working for two decades, until he finally released a book called Flix.
Tomi Ungerer draws some conclusions.

The documentary itself is a beautifully shot affair, with sprinkles of Ungerer’s animated work set to the dialogue in the film. What I fell in love with in this film was the honest portrayal of Tomi Ungerer: he’s shown as a man with faults and anxieties – that he deals with on a daily basis. He’s not perfect and the film lets us know that. It also has a very even pace and a very clear story arc and message behind it. I particularly liked Ungerer’s candid discussion of death; he mentions that a lot of his work deals with death in some way and that he feels it is an important lesson for children to learn at an early age. He laughs, noting that death isn’t something that we should fear; we should welcome it, because it is the beginning of something completely new. He says that if there is a heaven than we have the most beautiful world to go to when we die; but if there is just nothing after we expire, he says, that may be even better. For if there is nothing after we die, then that means there is infinite space to fill with our own possibilities and creations. Just like a blank piece of paper, the nothingness is an invitation to create. I highly recommend Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story.

10:30 am Monday, Sep 10, 2012 by Stuart Henderson

For anyone who grew up with Tomi Ungerer’s grotesque, bizarre, sublime children’s books in the late 1950s and early 1960s (“Crictor” & “The Three Robbers” among them), this film will be something of an eye opener. Did you ever wonder why those books disappeared off of the shelves of North American libraries in the early 1970s? Or how it was that Ungerer, among the most successful children’s book authors in the United States by 1965, slipped off of the radar, his books vanishing along with him? As a child of the late 1970s, I can attest to this absence—I never saw, nor did I ever hear about, any of his work. And yet, not ten years earlier, Ungerer had been the toast of the children’s book industry. Imagine: hailed by many of his contemporaries as a genius and vanguard figure—Maurice Sendak claims that “he influenced everybody”—and then: gone. What happened?

This documentary, exhaustively detailed and playfully presented, not only answers that question, but offers a wealth of food for thought about the relationship between art, the state, and individuality (not to mention sexuality, power, and creativity). Ungerer, raised under the Nazis in the decidedly complicated Franco-German milieu of Alsace, knew first-hand about the way kids respond to fear, to hatred, and he came to believe strongly in the need for children to confront, even embrace, these emotions. His children’s books were so surprising (and so affecting) because they never shied away from darkness. But, this is what also made his late-1960s antiwar and political posters so incendiary, too. And, it turns out, it was also what made his volumes of kink-themed erotica so deliciously transgressive. (See where this is going?) Thing was, few had figured out that it was the same guy who was doing these three things—erotica, antiwar posters, children’s books—simultaneously. And when they did figure it out: BOOM. Career over, books removed from libraries, name cut from the rolls of acceptable children’s book authors. It’s a hell of a story, and though the film drags in the final act (things got a lot less interesting while he was in his exile), it’s likely to be a crowd pleaser at this fest.

Rating: 7

Nathalie Atkinson | Sep 6, 2012 8:00 AM ET | Last Updated: Sep 6, 2012 8:38 AM ET

It’s hard to know where exactly to start when talking about a biopic of Tomi Ungerer. The man has packed at least three lifetimes — and five careers — into his 80 years. Commercial illustrator, graphic designer, children’s author, erotic artist, sculptor, political agitator, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, needle-sharp satirist, pig farmer.

As the documentary Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story, premiering at TIFF on Thursday, elaborates, the artist has juggled multiple identities all his life.

“I was French at home, Alsatian in the street and German in school,” Ungerer recalls on-screen of four long childhood years in his hometown of Strasbourg, where he was subjected to Nazi indoctrination during the annexation of Alsace by Germany, and rapidly learned to speak fluent German. “You don’t need Berlitz — a knife at your throat is enough,” he says with a shrug.

After reading a New York Times article about Ungerer in 2008, director Brad Bernstein, a producer of VH1′s Behind The Music, and co-producer Rick Cikowski spent three years rediscovering (and obsessing over) his life and work.

“His story spans these incredible seminal moments not only in American but in European history as well,” Bernstein says in an interview. They were finally granted access by their subject last year, filming in Nova Scotia, Strasbourg, New York and in a rare glimpse of Ungerer’s guarded private life, at his home in Ireland.

A bio-doc is a huge risk, Ungerer himself admits in a phone conversation from his home in West Cork, in advance of his Toronto visit. “You can be turned into a clown or an idiot,” he says. “But I think it’s very important in life not to concentrate totally on knowledge and we must still rely on instincts. It just smelled good — I didn’t smell a rat.”

Ungerer has written dozens of books and has been published in more than 30 languages; he was at one time one of the bestselling, award-winning children’s book authors in the United States and throughout the film Ungerer’s loose, expressive and colourful work — from naïve crayon art dating from his childhood to his later erotic sketches — comes to life, painstakingly animated with motion graphics. These were available thanks to loans from the award-winning museum dedicated to his work that opened in Strasbourg in 2007.

Until recently, Ungerer’s many famous children’s books — such as Crictor, about a pet boat constrictor or The Three Robbers, in which a trio of bandits kidnap a little girl — had been out of print in English. While both Ungerer and his friend Shel Silverstein did ribald illustrations for Playboy in the 1960s, only Ungerer was, effectively, driven out of town in the late 1960s. Between his other careers — drawing strident political posters and orgiastic adult lit — Ungerer was deemed too edgy for the children’s book establishment. For example, take Fornicon, his 1969 adult book of drawings riffing on the mechanization of sexuality. “It was always my worry that my erotic work should get into children’s hands,” he insists of the controversy, “but that is actually the responsibility of parents.”

No matter that the latter works were not intended for children, and never marketed as such. Instead, at the time he was reproached about the elements of darkness and fear in his children’s books as the excuse. Ungerer believes that a conspiracy against children’s intelligence persists today, assuming they are innocent and vacant. “My classic line is that children know where children come from, but they don’t know where the adults are coming from,” he chuckles over the phone. Fear and darkness are necessary for children, “because once you have fear you have to discover courage, to survive.”

In the doc, Bernstein spends an afternoon with Maurice Sendak, a dark children’s illustrator who was celebrated instead of vilified, filming what would be one of his last interviews. Sendak declares that there would probably be no Where the Wild Things Are without Ungerer’s influence. “I’m a self-taught raving maniac,” says Sendak, “but not as crazy as Tomi. Or as great as Tomi.”

“That speaks for itself,” Bernstein says, adding, “we could make a film just based on Maurice’s interview. You could do three films just on [Tomi's] New York years.”

“He was raised on hypocrisy, and was taught by the realities of his school days that ‘truth’ is whatever those in power say it is,” another friend, the Oscar-winning animation director Gene Deitch, says via email from his home in Prague. “It is the fear of reality that caused school boards and so-called educators to be terrified of Tomi Ungerer.”

The thousands of picture books indelibly inked with a screaming “discarded” stamp are the testament to the systematic removal of his books from libraries and institutions across the United States, yet the librarians and educators from that era who agreed to be interviewed on camera seem disingenuously vague about the details of his banishment (“I knew that they remembered, but that they didn’t want to revisit what they had done,” Bernstein says).

Ungerer took refuge in Canada when, in 1971, he and wife Yvonne settled on a pig farm in Lockeport, an island in Nova Scotia, where they lived for five years. (Ungerer chronicled that time in the illustrated journal Far Out Isn’t Far Enough, which lends this documentary its title.) In 1976, the couple moved to a sheep farm in rural Ireland to start a family.

That’s what’s most inspiring to Bernstein: that Ungerer simply kept moving onward. “He didn’t stop. His life didn’t end, his career didn’t end, it just ceased to exist in North America.”

“In my life I would rather take corners than curves and keep them very sharp,” Ungerer unapologetically tells the camera. It’s just as evident over the phone that Ungerer’s imagination still teems impatiently with more ideas than he can accomplish in a day.

“I’m simply having too much fun,” Ungerer says. “And I’m writing a lot. I have only that much time left so I am busier than ever.” Several museum exhibitions are planned, a Moon Man movie, new books and in particular an earnest love letter to his homeland, Ireland, called Fog Man. “It’s my homage, it’s the first time that I really put my feelings and my soul on the page, leaving aside satire.”

“My life has been a fairy tale,” he reiterates, before signing off. “Just like a storybook, with all its monsters.”

Far Out Isn’t Far Enough screens Sept. 6, 9:45 p.m. at TIFF Bell Lightbox 3, Sept. 8. 9:30 a.m. at Cineplex Yonge & Dundas 9, and Sept. 15, 4:30 p.m. at Cineplex Yonge & Dundas 10. Ungerer makes a special appearance and book signing Sept. 8. at 2 p.m.at Little Island Comics (742 Bathurst St.)

The official companion app for the documentary is available for free download on iTunes.

A Brief Cultural History of Tomi Ungerer

Forrest Gump has nothing on Tomi Ungerer. If there was an important cultural moment in the Sixties, he was present and part of it:

• In 1956, with $60 in his pocket, Ungerer moved to golden-ad-age New York as an illustrator and commercial graphic designer. One of his earliest gigs was illustrating Art Buchwald’s New York Herald Tribune column ‘The Brave Coward’ and soon, after cold-calling art directors (and becoming known for the collapsed Trojan Condoms packing box he carried to appointments in lieu of a portfolio), clients included Esquire, Life, Harper’s Bazaar and the New York Times; he coined the slogan ‘Expect the Unexpected’ for The Village Voice and won Society of Illustrators awards.
• Next, he drew a charming fable about little pigs (Mellops Go Flying) for which Harper & Row’s legendary juvenile book editor Ursula Nordstrom paid him a $600 advance and the hits kept coming, for 14 years. Later, Ungerer paid it forward and brought his friends Shel Silverstein and Edward Gorey into her orbit. “We were kind of a whole gang – we both worked for Playboy,” he says of introducing Silverstein to Nordstrom, and urging him to write for children. (That’s right: without Ungerer, no parents would be reading Silverstein bedtime rhymes.)
• He designed Ice Capades and Monterey Jazz Festival art.
• He illustrated the original Dr. Strangelove film poster for Stanley Kubrick.
• Percy Adlon made his first movie with Ungerer in Canada (and would go on to make Bagdad Café).
• Ungerer shared a house in the Hamptons with Philip Roth. (Roth, Bernstein says, respectfully declined to be interviewed for the film.)
• During Expo ‘67, Ungerer kept a studio in Montreal (“I was doing things for the Canadian Pavillion at the time”), where he started a production company, Wild Oats, with Gordon Sheppard and mixed with the likes of Leonard Cohen and Pierre Trudeau at the artsy downtown Montreal hangout the Bistro.

SEPTEMBER 7, 2012
By John C.

Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story:  Tomi Ungerer was a bestselling children’s book artist who inspired the likes of the great Maurice Sendak, before branching out to sharing his strongly felt personal beliefs through political protest posters in the 1960s.  But his career was cut short and his books were banned for years when it came to the public’s attention that he was drawing explicit erotica to further sexual fantasies in his spare time.  Although Far Out Isn’t Far Enough will likely hold most interest for those already fascinated by Tomi Ungerer’s story, first time director Brad Bernstein keeps the film moving with nicely done interviews and animated renderings of even the most erotic illustrations being discussed.  Those already interested in the subject are guaranteed to get the most value for the price of a ticket, but the film still offers a fine insight into the mind of a controversial artist and the cultural turning points that changed him for those of us less familiar with his work.

Thursday, September 6th – 9:45 PM @ TIFF Bell Lightbox

Saturday, September 8th – 9:30 AM @ Cineplex Yonge & Dundas

Saturday, September 15th – 4:30 PM @ Cineplex Yonge & Dundas

by RYAN MCNEIL on Sep 7, 2012 • 1:00 pm

When it comes to documenting the life of a visual artist,

The debut film by director Brad Bernstein TOMI UNGERER: FAR OUT ISN’T FAR ENOUGH, takes a deep look at a man whose entire life has been dedicated to establishing identity, overcoming fear, and creating wonderful, conic, provocative art.

The film has Tomi himself telling us his life story, sitting in his studio, bathed in daylight, surrounded by dozens of curious objects. He begins with his childhood in war-torn France, continues through his young adulthood that took him to New York City, and brings us finally to his later years where he moved to Ireland to raise a family.

Through every step of the journey, Tomi expressed himself the best way he knew how: with a pencil and a blank page. To give every one of these wonderful pieces of art their due, the film incorporates them well – often going so far as to animate them to life.

Ungerer’s work comes with quite a wingspan. He rose to notoriety by creating children’s books about a snake named Crictor, one about The Three Robbers, and many more. He also became inspired by the cultural revolution he saw happening around him in America and created some charged and inciting protest art. Finally, he also found himself fascinated by expressions of erotica, and likewise created playful and rousing pieces in that arena.

The film is quite an achievement for first time director Brad Bernstein. The conversations are honest and illuminating, and find a wonderful balance between telling Tomi’s story and illuminating his philosophies. Perhaps most interesting are his notions are a child’s response to fear. He believes that one has to know fear to tame it, and considering the many conversations I’ve had through the years about the unexpected fright factor of so-called family friendly films, I have to believe he’s on to something.

The film is brimming with reflection, whimsy, and artistic soul. It is a master class in artistic technique and observing the human condition. Its second half feels like it finds a better gear than the first, however that first half is crucial in learning of Tomi’s beginnings is crucial to understanding who he is and what he wants to say.

The takeaway from the film is a lesson in self-understanding and ambition. Tomi wants us to understand that everything about us is valuable – our virtues, our fears, our demons. Every virtue and vice we have in our character can be a source of great things, help us develop a better grasp on the world around us, and perhaps even contribute something valuable to it. Furthermore, he wants us never to be content to rest on our laurels (hence the film’s cheeky title).

He believes that any challenge – if it’s a worthy one – must immediately be followed by another challenge. Words to live by, if ever there were some, by this mischievous philosopher.

FAR OUT ISN’T FAR ENOUGH: THE TOMI UNGERER STORY plays tomorrow – 9:30am at Cineplex Yonge & Dundas, and once more on Saturday September 15th – 4:30pm at Cineplex Yonge & Dundas. (official website)

Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story
Director/Country/Time: Brad Bernstein, USA, 98 min.
Documentary
Program: TIFF Docs
Headline: Artist faces fascism, at home and abroad
Noel’s Take: Outside of its animated interludes, Brad Bernstein’s documentary Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story doesn’t deviate much from the talking-heads-and-archival-clips norm. But Bernstein relies mainly on one head: Ungerer himself, an artist who survived the Nazi occupation of Alsace in the ‘30s, the came to America, where he helped lead a revolution in commercial illustration and children’s books, away from rosy, Rockwellian realism and toward colorful, playful abstraction. And Ungerer has an fascinating and thought-provoking story to tell, too—not just about jackbooted stormtroopers, and New York during the creative flourish of the ‘60s, but about what happened when he started doing political and erotic drawings as well as work for the kiddies. Ungerer had always had a reputation for being an oddball, given that he had made children’s book heroes out of snakes and ogres. But his shockingly crude anti-Vietnam War posters, coupled with his flair for the pornographic, raised eyebrows among the parents and publishers who used to love him, effectively derailing his career. Well, one pathway of his career, anyway. As Ungerer himself says, every time a person makes a mark on a page, “You start a new life.” And as someone who had several lives, and stared down real fascists, the displeasure of prudes was hardly going to slow him down. Though ordinary in its stylistic approach, Far Out Isn’t Far Enough is full of Ungerer drawings that are far from ordinary, and as such the movie works as an exhibition—in every sense of the word.
Grade: B