We know that animation can express just about anything live-action film can, and in ways live-action film can’t. Every animator creates a physically individual world, with its own topography and architecture and differently shaped characters. So when animators take on an established live-action genre, the result can feel both known and transformed.
With its use of caricature, distortion and exaggeration, art can look “grotesque” without conveying grotesqueness; indeed, it can convey something quite the opposite. Like many of the most original cartoons, the drawing in “Common Side Effects,” which premiered Feb. 2 on Adult Swim and is streaming on Max, is less reminiscent of anything from animated history than it is of underground comics. The characters have big heads and little bodies with tiny mouths and hands; that they’re out of proportion and in some cases even a little crude does not interfere with their expressiveness or make them ridiculous. (Painterly backgrounds ground their reality.) They perfectly embody the more or less normal people they represent — though, being characters in an extravagant fiction, they are not average.
Created by Joseph Bennett and Steve Hely, the series concerns a blue mushroom. Not a “magic mushroom,” but a mushroom whose panacean properties are as good as magic, a potential cure-all, discovered in a Peruvian forest by Marshall (Dave King), a sweet, sort-of-renegade botanist. Big and bearded, shirt ever open, in shorts and sandals and a bucket hat, he’s under surveillance by the government, which as part of the pharmaceutical-industrial complex is not keen to have that business destroyed. The health industry, in this telling, is willing literally — rather than just incidentally — to kill to keep people sick.
After disrupting a presentation by Rick ( Mike Judge, also an executive producer), the president of a company called Reutical Pharmaceutical, Marshall is approached by Frances (Emily Pendergast), who knew him in high school — one of those “pretty girl lab-partnered with the nerd” situations. She hides from him the fact that she’s the assistant to the very man he has just been attacking, and after Marshall demonstrates to her the mushroom’s curative properties, she decides to take it to her sick-of-it-all boss, who’s worried he’s about to lose his job. (Business has been bad.)
