Big City Pizza – Charlotte Film Festival Selection Review – Entertainment + Culture Coverage of Independent Media from CLT & Beyond

It is exciting to see obscure features come to our local cinemas, especially when it is an animation. Deep down, I crave the weirder, experimental, and strikingly unconventional pieces of art that admittedly, I grew up watching and still look for today.

Growing up on features like A Scanner Darkly, The Animatrix, and The Triplets of Belleville, paired together with MTV’s Liquid Television, Cartoon Networks’ Adult Swim after 12am, and Newgrounds’ countless indie creators installed in me how fun the entire experience could be for both the creators and the audience. In mentioning the latter of those come-to-mind influences, seeing Big City Pizza at this year’s Charlotte Film Festival was a no brainer, and while it could be jarring at moments, the film captured everything I’ve come to love about off-beat works.

Stills from Big City Pizza (Credit: Dusty Saunders)

Directed, created, and written by Dusty Saunders, Big City Pizza has a fairly simple premise. From the POV of Boney (Sean Berrie), a literal walking talking skeleton pizza driver, we watch his interactions with coworkers at his night job, Big City Pizza, and ride with him on what is foreshadowed to be a very unusual shift. With a blood-red moon hovering in the sky and the Omniball Championship in full swing, the city’s energy is on another level. Anything could happen, and as the audience finds out quickly, that’s part of the charm within the 88-minute runtime.

Starting off from Boney’s room, hanging with his cat as they watch a small bit of a Judge Judy parody on TV, I already had a hunch that this was going to be a fairly unserious adventure. Thankfully, I was right.

From the moment Boney leaves his bed, he talks with his neighbor, a suited-up goldfish watering his plants, visits the convenience manned by a shark, and gives a cigarette to a ghost that pops up out of a manhole, all while walking the fifty-or-less feet to his job through a back alley. Berrie’s vocal delivery, during these instances to the final visual, hits every action and occasion with such a low-toned casual delivery that makes everything happening feel like this is all just a normal day. In a way, that made everything that might be unsettling or shocking not as much, so when something did jostle him, it was felt.

The setting in which Big City Pizza exists feels both unsettling and like any other night in a typical bustling city’s surroundings. The structures of the city itself were more familiar than it was fantastical. I could easily go out and see the same 24-hour spots, neon signs, and graffitied areas in my own downtown area, grounding a great bit of the feature.

The anthropomorphic characters Boney meets look outlandish, and do act as such more often than not, but I also felt like I’ve met some of the same personalities in my own time as a pizza guy. Regardless of my background, nothing I’ve ever experienced was as chaotic as Boney’s escapades that night, which also made the POV voyeurism that much more entertaining to live through.

I think that same life experience is a reason as to why I might not be as critical of the pacing in this film. A good chunk of the runtime is Boney on his shop’s bike going from location to location, which can feel long. I would argue that particular detail is part of the sacrifice in making the movie entirely one uncut experience, and those sections do get paced up as the movie continues.

Another set of sections where the timing might suffer a bit are in the delivery stop segments. One particular episode I’ll allude to here includes helping with a kink session, where Boney is put between collecting the pizza fee and the customer’s instructions. Again, as Boney himself is usually relaxed, the moment that state is broken by awkwardness or shock, the audience is as well. In a way, that makes everything in the film feel more real-to-life and on the same token more engaging.

In framing the movie, I and the friends I saw it with all felt like this whole journey could easily have been modeled after a point-and-click video game. Each part of the movie felt like a different stage, aside from the city being a “main hub area”. With the way each stop and sub-setting was completely distinct from the last, especially in one of the last ones where a city alley suddenly gives way to an overgrown graveyard that feels more in place in Warcraft or Diablo, each scene is easily identifiable from the last, adding to the over all viewing experience.

I’ve made it this far without talking about the adult content that is laced somewhat into the film, and the scales of those aspects vary between each moment. As might be expected, language isn’t censored at all, so a casual amount of “fuck” and “shit” to be in the dialogue, but not at an egregious level or for real spectacle. As for what might put off some viewers, apart from the early kink scene, there is a psychedelic episode that occurs near the end that fully pantomimes a blowjob without actually showing it (also, Boney’s a skeleton, so packages aren’t included).

That one-to-two-minute segment was weird, funny to a degree, and extremely awkward all in one package. Given that it was part of a trip sequence, all of that might have been expected, but it had to be the wildest thing I’ve ever seen in animated form. Dicks in general are seen at random moments through the film, used as ways to slightly shake Boney up, so if animated nudity is not your cup of tea, then this is your sign to clock out of this shift.

Big City Pizza is unlike any animated adventure I’ve experienced up to this point, which will make it memorable for years to come and an occasional recommendation once more widespread distribution starts. With Boney’s POV being centered through the film, we got to feel more connected to the world and its characters than otherwise might be possible, to better and stranger ends. The Blender-animated world put together by Saunders felt equally fanciful and grounded in reality, from the settings down to some of the interactions, making everything almost believable (at least to fellow pizza slingers). Guaranteed, this movie is the most fun that viewers will have not having to man the delivery bike themselves, and a unique treat for animation lovers everywhere.