It's Just Movies

— by TOM ELCE —

Based on the supposedly legendary story of Major League Baseball player Dock Ellis’s experience of pitching a ball while under the influence of LSD, the short film “Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No” portrays the trippy event in all its hallucinogenic glory. It’s a quirky, engaging approach that director James Blagden has taken with this four-minute animated illumination, though it’s arguable that the style brought to the subject is as much responsible for some of the film’s shortcomings.

Not necessarily as funny as it might have been, the short channels Ellis’s bizarre baseball experience with narration from the late man himself, whose cool, “it’s all good” vocals perfectly compliment the material on-screen. In terms of animated appearance, “Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No” brought strange reminders of 2007’s “Persepolis,” an entirely different breed of movie that naturally wasn’t benefiting from the short’s simultaneously outrageous and worrying biography.

Really, “Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No” is no great shakes, but it is pretty funny, well-animated and perfectly narrated, offering up a chance both to hear the laid-back chords of the man’s voice and sort-of witness his preposterous experience. You’ve got the time, and it’s not a bad way to spend it.

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