Animation Magazine - Issue #26 November 1993
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By Mike van den Bos
Danny Antonucci catapulted into infamy riding on three-and-a-half minutes of cursing, exploding meat. The three-and-a-half minute blast is Antonucci's first animated short film, Lupo the Butcher, a savage hit on the international film festival circuit and on European television. Besides his status as a cult cartoon-maker, Antonucci is also one of Canada's top creative, commercial animation directors, a fashion plate and a gourmet chef. What follows is Antonucci's description of his recipe for Eggplant Parmesan:
"It's been passed down from generation to generation. In Italy it's carved on my grandparent's tombstone. Let's start with a nice bottle of Barolo wine, the best goddamn wine you can get! Fuck all that Australian and Chili stuff! You need about four to six eggplants. Cut the heads off. Skin the eggplants. I think it has to dowith the fact that a lot of Italians have foreskin, so they want to get rid of that. Slice up the eggplants into 1/4-inch slices. You can either cut it round or you can do it length-ways. Put the eggplant on wax paper in a tray and you spray them with salt. This is the tricky part; you gotta put the salt in your mouth and spit it onto the eggplant. What's happening now is the salt is sucking all the water out, so the eggplant isn't soggy when you fry it. Let it sit for a half hour and then you polish off the bottle of Barolo wine.
"While you're drinking another bottle of wine you can start making the sauce. Sauce is always important in Italian cuisine. Get some nice tomatoes, preferably plum tomatoes. You don't want to stick in whole tomatoes. Put the tomatoes in a Cuisnart and blend it. Get the sauce creamy. Put a pot on the stove. Start heating it and pour in the oil. Just cover the bottom of the sauce pan with the oil. Put in one small to medium onion and three to four cloves of garlic. Fry those up and then you want some nice hunks of beef and pork to make the sauce. It's all frying up in the hot oil. Don't burn the garlic, just sear the meat.
"Keep drinking the Barolo wine. Once the meat has seared, pour in your tomatoes that are all nicely blended and that'll stop all the frying. Start sticking in basil, pepper, salt, parsley, I even like throwing in a bit of nutmeg sometimes. If you've got any of the wine left throw it in or just stick your fingers down you throat and regurgitate some of that wine back into the sauce. Bring the sauce to a boil, put a lid on it and then turn it down to minimum and let it simmer."
On cooking the eggplant: "To make up your batter break four eggs. Spice them with pepper, salt, you can even put in some parsley. Beat them until they're smooth. Dip the eggplants into the egg mixture and then dip them in flour and fry it in a hot pan of oil, the size of which I'm not sure.
"See, that's the nice thing about Italian cooking, you don't measure anything. You always cook by feel, by touch, by taste. Deep fry all the fucking eggplant. This takes a while, so you gotta sit there, have a drink of wine, light up a smoke and the ashes fall in — big fuck, everybody thinks it's pepper. After the eggplant is fried, put it on paper towels to soak up the oil. It helps because it doesn't make the Eggplant Parmesan dish too soggy; all that oil and all that sauce, it's just like a lump of shit when
you cut it out of the tray.
"Time's gone by, you've already thrown up once in the toilet from all the wine. Now, you're ready to start assembling this thing. Grate up your mozzarella and Romano cheese. Use nice hunks of cheese. Don't buy one of those stupid cartons of pre-grate. Grate it yourself, so you know it's coming from a hunk of cheese, not from some sawmill plant in Oregon.
"Lightly coat your baking pan with butter. If we're in Italy you use lard. Fat is very important in food. That's where the taste comes from. The more you keep cutting fat out of everything the worse it'll taste. You want to live forever?
"We're talking an Italian meal here. just eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die. You got your eggplants on you left, you got your buttered pan in the center, the cheeses and your sauce on the right.
Remember, you're not using the meat. The meat was to give that sauce flavor. Start with a nice layer of the tomato sauce, not too heavy because you don't want to make it soggy. Lay a thin coat to cover the bottom. Put in a layer of eggplant — you want to fill the bottom up. Don't pile it too high. Just lay it flat. If you have spaces the cheese will fill that all up. Now, you want to get a nice healthy layer of the mozzarella cheese and a layer of the Romano cheese. Get another scoop of tomato sauce. Repeat it. Eggplant, Mozzarella, Romano, tomato sauce. Keep going until you run out of eggplant. If it piles high — that's okay, because when it bakes it'll come back down. again. All that cheese will melt.
"Preheat your oven at 350°. Make sure your oven rack is in the middle position. Throw the Eggplant Parmesan in the oven and let it start cooking. Wait to see that the sauce is boiling and then it's ready to go. Usually the top won't be brown, but that's fine. Some people like to have it brown, some don't. I like it brown — the more carcinogens the better. Throw theoven onto broil. Let it brown a bit. Pull it out. It's important to let it sit for about five to 10 minutes; that's so the cheese coagulates and it doesn't fall apart when you cut into it. It's like when you shoot a guy you don't automatically start to chop him up and get rid of the body. Leave him in the trunk of the car for a while, go get a salami sandwich — let him set in the trunk for a while before you chop him up, so the blood coagulates and there isn't a big mess.
"You get a lot of ignorant people who don't know what an eggplant is and that an eggplant is really, really good. Eggplants are the bananas of Italy. I forgot to say when you do serve it to you guests that you need to have a priest come over and bless the eggplants, and he swings one of those incense things. That stuff smells like crap, but it blesses the meal, everything's fine and then you pig out."
Mike van den Bos is a producer for International Rocketship in Vancouver, Canada.
"That's Bob and Juan, the Siamese Coroner, a two-headed guy — one's the brains, one's the brawnwho goes around trying to find love. That's the basic premise and the cartoon speaks for itself," explains Danny Antonucci, this issue's truly outrageous Cameo Cartoonist. He says this character is definitely in the works for a short.
Antonucci, of Canada's International Rocketship, gained cult notoriety with his loopy three-and-a-half minute carve-up of cursing, exploding meat, Lupo the Butcher. "I was frustrated after working on children's stuff for so long," explains Antonucci. "The craziest thing on TV at that time (1985-6) was Scooby Doo."
Lupo fans can look forward to a new film being produced in conjunction with Rocketship called Meat the Family. In it Lupo is at home with his family. It's his birthday and they're going to throw him a party. We won't give any more away; we'll just say it's sure to be a juicy tale.
When asked what he thinks outrageous animation is, Antonucci maintains he doesn't like to use labels. "It's such a board term. You could ask a nun what she thinks is outrageous and it'd be completely different than what I might think. To me, it's just slapstick taken to another level. If it makes me laugh, it makes me laugh." — N. Kourtney Kaye
