About the film

Comedian, actor, physician, mountaineer, rugby enthusiast, pipe smoker, alcoholic and consummate Englishman — the late Graham Chapman was a man for all seasons. But this member of Monty Python was not one to let his already colorful life prevent him from making up an even wilder one. Published in 1980, Chapman's outrageously false memoir “A Liar's Autobiography” (Volume VI) was a work of blithe, unashamed and inspired fiction. And it has now inspired this insanely entertaining animated biopic in 3 D, no less.

Despite being dead for twenty-three years, Chapman himself is the star of the show, thanks to forty-five minutes of newly discovered audio recordings of readings from Liar's done in Harry Nilsson's studio. Different groups of animators bring Chapman's dubious remembrances to life in a dizzying array of styles. Four-fifths of Chapman's former Python comrades — John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam — crop up throughout, playing themselves and various other equally dubious characters Chapman encounters on his journeys. Whisking through Chapman's sadly foreshortened life — he died of cancer in 1989, aged forty-eight — A Liar's Autobiography recounts his years in medical school, his first meeting with longtime writing partner Cleese at Cambridge, the high days of Pythonage, his coming-out as a gay man (or seventy percent gay, according to a survey he conducted on himself), and, of course, his abduction and transport to the heavens by space aliens at the end of the eighties. Even cancer, it seems, cannot vanquish the truly inveterate liar.

Predictably hilarious, A Liar's Autobiography is a wonderfully inventive tribute to one of the great comic minds of the twentieth century. But how much of it is true? "Nothing," declaims Terry Jones, "It's all a downright, absolute, blackguardly lie." Well, let's give it at least seventy percent. Now piss off.

Wybrane festiwale i nagrody / Selected festivals and awards: 2012 – MFF Toronto / Toronto IFF, 2012 – MFF Tokio / Tokyo IFF