Chew Chew Baby

A man and his sidekick are driving through a safari in africa, lost in contemplation of the exotic scenary. They pull up in front of a bevy of pigmies and find the diminutive folk quite cute, while one distinct speciman starts daydreaming about cooking the tourist alive in a cauldron. While our plucky man asks for the pigmy to pose for a photograph, the audience gets the first glimpse that something is amiss: the pigmy flashes a disturbing set of pointy teeth, resembling the jaws of a tropical fish. Later safely ensconced in his home, the man throws a slide presentation depicting highlights of his recent trip to a loose collection of acquaintances when a knock is heard from the front door. In comes the meanest thing under 4 feet tall: the same pigmy that was being shown on the slide exhibition stands before one very astounded man, but he is still unsuspecting of this tiny stranger's motivation.

We immediately cut to both going to sleep, when the titular foe's stomach starts growling in a most audible manner. Without a second thought, he sets out to lunge at his sleeping host, when the latter wakes up just before having his arm chomped off. He assumes that the pigmy has a toothache and takes him to a dentist. The little man eyes up the dental care professional with gleeful enthusiasm and once both are alone behind a closed door, a loud chomping sound is heard from outside and the pigmy exits the room with a pleasant expression on his face, like a cat that just got the cream. The shot of the dentist's office even has the gall to show an overhead tube dangling above the patient's chair, indicating that a terrible struggle just took place.

The next scenes are nothing but a succession of the following pigmy's victims being disposed off in gruesome fashion. There is somethinhg intrinsically terrifying about not being aware that one's life is in danger until it's too late, and this cartoon gets it down to a T.

It isn't until one of our hero's childhood friends is gulped down that he wises up to the pigmy's murderous intent. With little decorum he takes off running, with the demonic goblin in hot pursuit. At first, nothing seems to stop his blood-thirsty onrush and our good character seems to be running out of places to hide when he's run down by a motor vehicle. The cannibal beast prepares for one final assault at his coveted prey when an ambulance intervenes in the nick of time and the paramedic gets immediately busy to do an impromptu blood transfusion by getting the tiny man beast as the donour. Before long, our good-hearted man devolves into a ravenous beast and takes off after a desperate foreign midget. The hunter slowly catches up to his fleeing prey and a slash of the former's jaws ends the cartoon, complete with a violent shake of the end card.


This is hardly a boring cartoon, though it's clearly not recommended to young children. In many ways, it resembles a very short horror movie: there's no background music and the pervading foreboding atomosphere is enough to set off warning klaxons early on. It's also not animated in a conventional manner, it's jerky and simplistic, but definitely not in a cute childlike way. In addition, the scene transition has that famous fadeout effect, akin to real movies, which further distances it from the usual trappings and puerile appeal that a regular cartoon should offer. The final quarter of the show features a chase sequence, and any new viewer would do well to not try to anticipate what will transpire. It's already enough of a twist to have real people picked off one by one, so there's no way to predict a happy ending. Instead, a cliffhanger wraps up the sequence of horror killings, leaving it up to the viewer to interpret our hero's descent to madness and cannibalistic vices.