Film review - A Savage Art: The life and cartoons of Pat Oliphant.

 reviewed by Peter Kuper

A Savage Art: The life and cartoons of Pat Oliphant. Bill Banowsky (dir.). Magnolia Pictures, 2025. https://asavageart.com/

 

 

Bill Banowsky’s compelling documentary, “A Savage Art: The life and cartoons of Pat Oliphant,“ opens with a biplane doing wild loop-de-loops across the sky trailing smoke like a pen stroke. An appropriate introduction to the pilot, Patrick Oliphant, whose daredevil approach to political cartooning has left a long trail of imitators and skewered politicians.

Oliphant, an Australian immigrant to the US, came from a relatively famous family. His uncle, Sir Marcus Oliphant, had worked on the development of the A-bomb. Pat got his start in Australia as a copyboy for a Murdock paper, but later right-place, right-timed his way into a cartoon career, replacing another paper’s departing cartoonist. Quickly feeling hamstrung by editorial control, Oliphant itched to bring more personal commentary into his work and created the opportunity by introducing a secondary voice in the form of a penguin named ‘Punk.’  This invention alone has left an indelible stamp on the art form as the character’s offspring include Tom Toles’ mini-me commentator at the corner of his panels and Tom Tomorrow’s Sparky, a penguin with sly asides, among many others. The documentary itself uses Punk to great effect throughout, with lively animation interstitials creating entertaining chapter breaks. Though his fine feathered friend was popular and expanded the content of Oliphant’s commentaries, he felt that “everyone had gone to the beach” in Australia when it came to interest in current events. So he picked up his growing family—a wife and two kids and Punk – and headed to America finding a job at the Denver Post.

Walking in the footsteps of giants like Rowlandson, Gillray, Daumier, Goya, Nast and of course the most stellar of influences — Mad Magazine’s usual gang of idiots – Oliphant brought back a level of artistic skill that had faded from most editorial pages. Winning the Pulitzer in 1967 propelled him to much greater fame, but given it was for his least favorite cartoon in his submission package (worse still, since his editor had rewritten the caption flattening the wording) it confirmed his belief that prizes, and editorial influence over his work, were bullshit. He later moved to The Washington Star and when it folded, moved to highly successful independent syndication.

the 1966 Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoon, now at the Library of Congress

Banowsky gives a nice amount of contextualizing with historic footage and includes greats like Ed Sorel who elucidates, among many salient observations, a brief history of political cartooning. It launched, according to Sorel, during the Reformation in 1517 (the best artists were on the Protestant side) – and then leaps through printing inventions such as woodcuts and lithography, that expanded the reach of cartoons to the masses. Others including Ann Telnaes, Bill Mauldin and Adam Zyglis cast a light on the visual alchemy of Oliphant’s drawings and his impact on other cartoonists. (I count myself among the legion of imitators, lifting his Reagan caricature whole-cloth in my early attempts at political cartooning.)

 

Oliphant was a rare talent who could cut to the core of his subjects. He identified the defining tells — Nixon’s 12 o’clock shadow, Carter’s shrinking size, Reagan’s blank eyes, George Bush Sr.’s leading chin, Bill Clinton’s snake oiliness, giving readers layers of understanding beyond the headlines.

As Sorel notes, some cartoons are art while some don’t transcend their form. Some ascend on all levels… idea, wording and artful execution. Over time and through an estimated 10,000 cartoons, Oliphant evolved into one of our field’s shining examples of that trinity realized. He then added sculpting to his repertoire, and created three-dimensional cartoons that could tower in museums.  “A Savage Art,” with a great soundtrack and subtle foley art, captures all this and much more of his history with verve.

  Peter Kuper’s latest graphic novel is Insectopolis. He has written and drawn Spy vs Spy for Mad since 1997 and teaches cartooning at Harvard.

 

 

George H.W. Bush (photo by Kuper)

Richard Nixon (photo by Kuper)

Richard Nixon (photo by Kuper)

Oliphant's drawing table  (photo by Kuper)