when childhood dreams go horribly wrong…
Have you ever wondered what your favorite cartoon characters look like without skin or organs? Well, here's your chance to find out...
A museum of natural history in Basel, Switzerland was home to an interesting exhibition of animal skeletons, something you'd consider perfectly normal for any natural history museum. But there was one little exception in this particular bone show. None of the creatures featured were actually living things. Unless of course you consider Tweety, Mickey Mouse, Wile E. Coyote or Tom and Jerry to be living things. In fact, the skeleton in the little photo composite above is none other than Bugs Bunny, created by South Korean artist Hyungkoo Lee for an installation he calls Animatus. The point of this potentially macabre display? Either to show the techniques paleontologists use to map bone structures with a cartoony twist, or make little kids cry. I'm not sure which.
The bones themselves are made from a resin which can simulate bone in texture and appearance, held by a lattice of aluminum, and suspended in their final pose by stainless steel wire. To give the whole setup a notch of extra creepiness, Lee positioned a number of the cartoon skeletons in classic poses almost anyone would instantly recognize. Wile E. is chasing the Road Runner, Jerry is making a break from a bipedal Tom, and the skeleton of Donald Duck is diving towards his bony nephews. The whole thing could be summed up as a Dia de los Muertos according to Looney Toons and MGM, circa 1950s, and it certainly falls in line with Lee's other bizarre and anatomically centered works. Since the show's run was from 2006 to 2008 in Europe and South Korea, it's probably not coming to a city near you anytime soon, but who knows, it could always be resurrected someday in the future, provided there's demand and an appropriate place to host the artwork…
