Arena (1975)

Ubu (1979x17)

Air date: Mar 05, 1979

The television premiere of Geoff Dunbar's brilliant animation film. Based on Alfred Jarry's notorious surrealist hero, Pere Ubu, it chronicles the rise to power of a kind of punk Macbeth, a lewd and unscrupulous despot with the mentality of a petit bourgeois and with absolutely no redeeming qualities. Ubu Roi was originally written by Jarry as a schoolboy in 1888 and eventually presented to an outraged public in 1896. For his version of the story Dunbar has invented a brutal and graphic style to recreate the explosive impact of Jarry's original production.