A SAVAGE ART: THE LIFE & CARTOONS OF PAT OLIPHANT

A Savage Art: The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant, Magnolia Pictures

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | September 4, 2025

An artist's work can speak for itself, and that is very much the case when it comes to political cartoons. The medium and message are wholly intertwined in that centuries-old form of both art and humor, and good jokes don't need to be explained, anyway. With all of that, one wonders what goal director Bill Banowsky might have had in mind with his documentary A Savage Art: The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant when it comes to the second part of the movie's subtitle.

Can anyone actually tell us more about long-time political cartoonist Pat Oliphant's work than the work itself tells us? After a cursory history of political cartoons here, Banowsky has pretty much set himself up to fail at diving into any real depth when it comes to his subject's art. Cartoons aren't meant to be deep, after all, and for a stretch of time, those in power were genuinely worried about their influence. People who couldn't read the news of the day could see and understand a caricature of a monarch or some person of influence.

The most effective examples medium, in other words, are clear and to-the-point and uncomplicated, and seeing a few hundred examples of Oliphant's cartoons throughout this documentary do make a very good case that the man was one of the best, until his retirement in 2015. Indeed, the movie could have been an extended montage of as many cartoons as Banowsky could gather and for which he could obtain the rights, and it almost surely would have said more about the course of recent history than this fairly standard documentary.

It doesn't help the filmmaker that Oliphant himself seems the type to let his work for itself, too. There's some archival footage here of him explaining how to tell a full story in a single image, and it's noteworthy that Oliphant doesn't appear on camera during the most important part.

Instead, the camera is locked on a piece of paper, and Oliphant's pen hastily sketches a scene of what looks to be a man and a woman in a car. He narrates the story as he draws, establishing the car, the man, and another figure with long flowing hair that catches the eye of the viewer. It's only when Oliphant draws a dog's face connected to the hair that he has finished the story, given us a lesson about how perspective matters, and made a decent joke within the exercise.

If Baowsky's purpose here is to make us want to seek out more and more of Oliphant's work, the director has succeeded—but not in any special way. Indeed, finding more of the man's cartoons might render the movie itself unnecessary, except for the handful of biographical details we receive about the man.

They're pretty ordinary, too, since Oliphant isn't exactly one to speak of his personal life, either. That task is left to his son Grant, his third wife Susan Conway, and his daughter Susanne, who didn't much see or speak to him until the two reconnected when she turned 40 or so. The most interesting detail, perhaps, is that Oliphant was born, raised, and spent his very early adult years as a native Australian citizen, but upon arriving in the United States, he was quick to understand American politics so well that he could succinctly but pointedly satirize them and their key players.

Otherwise, the biographical details are little more than one could read in an encyclopedia entry about the man, as he moved from Denver to the heart of U.S. politics in Washington, D.C., went from some frustrating changes at the hands of editors to becoming completely independent, and kept drawing until his health could no longer allow it and, shortly after, major newspapers started eliminating the job of political cartoonist from their staffs. There's an interesting discussion, perhaps, to be had here about the rise of memes online as making hand-crafted satire appear irrelevant, but despite putting together a collection of other cartoonists to serve as talking heads here, Banowsky doesn't seem interested in going into too much detail or depth.

Instead, we get a collection of selected cartoons, the origin story of the little penguin who served as Oliphant's stand-in, a basic explanation of how he drew most of the U.S. presidents who were in office during his career, and some examples of how he influenced and inspired so many of his contemporaries and those who would follow in the field. It's some nice trivia, and hearing Oliphant explain how he viewed those presidents and used that perspective to create caricatures, which weren't always physically accurate but still looked and felt right, is a bit enlightening.

Again, it's the cartoons that matter. While A Savage Art: The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant provides plenty of them for us to see, is the movie any more informative about them than spending 90 minutes going through a printed collection? When the work speaks for itself as clearly and cleanly as Oliphant's does, that's probably not the case.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products