Posted: 04/22/2007

Fungus the Bogeyman

(2007)

by Sawyer J. Lahr

In this four-hour animated British Television mini-series, Fungus (Mak Wilson) is among us. Fungus is a father, a husband, and a bona-fide bogeyman, as he says, but he risks getting caught by the “drycleaners” (humans) who live in bright lights and cleanliness, dumping toxic chemicals down drains, making a lot of waste, and waging war.

This version of the homo sapien world is taught to the children of Bogeydom, an underground labyrinth of a civilization where the inhabiting creatures live happily filthy. The bogey men and women appear to exist in somewhat of a police state, where being clean is strictly forbidden and any exploration of the world “up-top” is only for the adult bogeymen and exercised with great caution.

One of a number of books by writer Raymond Briggs, adapted for the screen, is called Fungus the Bogeyman. This film of the same name constructs its own “damp” world of bogeydom where greasy and gratuitous would be welcome complements to bogeypeople.

The film depicts the young son of a bogey family that is the counterpart to the Whites, a family of humans, both acting as protagonists and antagonists toward one another. The two very opposite families clash when Fungus terrorizes the Whites with dirt and grime. Conflict arises from the desperation of the human father, George White, a reporter, who tries to exploit the bogeypeople in order to win himself a job at a more syndicated newspaper. He is motivated by his displeasure with the stale local paper that employs him, apparently an only option since his family moved away from the city.

Among the human population, bogymen are only fictional until they are seen by unsuspecting human eyes. Fungus is caught breaking into the homes of suburban families and, contrary to myth, seems scary more because he is foreign, smelly, and strange rather than because he is a bogeyman. The bogeypeople are surprisingly a lot like us humans and not the stereotypically haunting creatures of the dark that are feared by human children like Tom White, the young son of the White family.

However much of a shock seeing a real bogeyman is for the family’s daughter, Jessica, she fearlessly searches out Fungus the bogeyman, staying out all night and lying to her parents. Eventually the young girl is trapped in Bogeydom until she can escape.

This series has been compared to the Disney/Pixar feature Monsters, Inc., a story in which a similar human girl enters a monster world and must be kept out of sight or, like Bogeydom, their society would be threatened.

Slimy sludgy transitions are swiped across the screen between scenes. Squishy sound effects add to the gross atmosphere in which Fungus and wife, Mildew, their daughter, Mucus, and Mold revel.

With CGI technology, animation is generated over the performances of actors to visualize the dingy bogeypeople.

Similar to themes in The Borrowers (1997), Fungus the Bogeyman has a decided moral message about needing to settle our differences. Fungus’s family and, in particular, Mold, teach us by their example that a way to resolving different customs, beliefs, and habits of living thinking organisms is to question our prejudices and embrace diversity rather than give into fear.

Sawyer J. Lahr is a film critic living in Chicago.

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