Terry Gilliam’s Debut Animated Film, Storytime

Ter­ry Gilliam’s fun­ny debut film, Sto­ry­time, fea­tures three ear­ly exam­ples of the Mon­ty Python ani­ma­tor’s twist­ed take on life. The film is usu­al­ly dat­ed 1968, but accord­ing to some sources it was actu­al­ly put togeth­er sev­er­al years lat­er. The clos­ing seg­ment, “A Christ­mas Card,” was cre­at­ed in late 1968 for a spe­cial Christ­mas-day broad­cast of the chil­dren’s pro­gram Do Not Adjust Your Set, but the oth­er two seg­ments– “Don the Cock­roach” and “The Albert Ein­stein Story”–were broad­cast on the 1971–1972 British and Amer­i­can pro­gram The Mar­ty Feld­man Com­e­dy Machine, which fea­tured Gilliam’s Pythonesque ani­ma­tion sequences at the begin­ning and end of each show. What­ev­er the date of pro­duc­tion, Sto­ry­time (now added to our col­lec­tion of 675 Free Movies Online in the Ani­ma­tion Sec­tion) is an engag­ing stream-of-con­scious­ness jour­ney through Gilliam’s delight­ful­ly absurd imag­i­na­tion. If you’re a Ter­ry Gilliam fan, don’t miss these oth­er relat­ed items:

Ter­ry Gilliam Shows You How to Make Your Own Cutout Ani­ma­tion

Ter­ry Gilliam: The Dif­fer­ence Between Kubrick (Great Film­mak­er) and Spiel­berg (Less So)