Art & Max (review)

The southwestern landscape has always attracted artists, so it's probably inevitable that its natives—the lizards—prove to be dab hands with a paintbrush as well. Max, an exuberant little green lizard, interrupts Art (short for Arthur), the horned lizard, to join in on the painting session. Max, however, misunderstands Art's "You could paint me" suggestion and splatters Art head to toe with pigment; subsequent attempts to clean up the situation wash Art down to a line drawing, which Max then unravels. Fortunately, the little lizard is eager to repair the situation, so he reassembles Art's lines and then hastily repaints him—into a gleaming pointillist wonder. The metatextuality is entertaining, but it doesn't really garner much narrative traction without the subtextual implications about the inception of modern art, with Art moving on from his sober, classically heroic portraiture to a Pollockian spattering of a cactus (while Max Van Goghs up the neighboring canvas). That's going to be a long conceptual trip for most youngsters, and without it, the story's focus is somewhat diffuse and the punchline weak, with Max's comeuppance—being doused with paint himself—tucked into a side of the spread. There's still humor, though, in the pairing of the making of art with the unmaking of Art, and in the slapstick story of siblingesque pestering resulting in disaster. The mixed-media art combines a documentary level of realism in lizard anatomy and period appliances (Max, evidently borrowing from his southwestern neighbor Wile E. Coyote, employs a fine-looking fan from the Acme Corporation) with a comic vitality as the reptiles melodramatically mug and posture. Adult intervention would help audiences to get the most out of this, so if you're looking for an offbeat literary entry into discussions of art movements and creativity, it could provide a generously reptilian opportunity.