Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie is not a video game movie. It’s not based on a video game property, or even features video games in its plot in a primary way. But from its opening moments, it’s clear that its creators and its director, Matt Johnson, are video game fans, and specifically fans of 16-bit RPGs. Johnson and his creative partner, Jay McCarrol, are also the creators of the viral Wii Shop Update Day video where they run down an impressive list of classic video game titles set to the tune of the Wii’s Shop Channel music.
Matt confirms his favourite video game is Baldur’s Gate 2. There’s a lot of video game chat here; I captured most of them in the tags but it’s an interesting read regardless!
“Everything you’re watching is happening for real with people who don’t know what’s going on, except for the obvious moments where we’re working with our friends,” Johnson says. “And we are just shooting as though we’re shooting a student film, without any sense of permits or permission at all.”
Now the two adapt the series for big screen (via Elevation Pictures ), and while the medium may have changed, Johnson and McCarrol’s premise remains the same: their fictionalized selves, Matt and Jay, are determined to fulfill their lifelong dream of playing a gig at Toronto’s famed club the Rivoli.
“In the past 12 hours since the premiere, I’ve had endless conversations with people asking me what is real and what isn’t,” says Johnson. “The best answer that I can give is that the things people think we faked we really did, and the things that people haven’t even thought of, we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on VFX to make it look like it happened. Now, at the CN Tower, we’re playing all kinds of tricks. … It would have been international news otherwise.”
Each episode follows two zoo animals – excitable monkey Matt (voiced by Johnson) and a quieter bird named Bird (McCarrol) – who attempt to escape into the outside world. Combining hand-drawn animation that recalls Canadian studio Nelvana at its Babar peak with an improv-comedy sensibility familiar to the NTBTS fanbase, Matt & Bird is both nostalgic and refreshing. There is no garish CGI (hello, Cocomelon and Pinkfong), no irritating cutesy performances (stop it, Blippy) and no corporate mandate to push toys (Paw Patrol, Bakugan).
To understand just how much of a game changer nirvanna the band the show is, it’s best to start with describing what it isn’t. It is not a sloppily spelled Kurt Cobain cover group. Nor is it an ode to Buddhist enlightenment. It’s not about a band or even a show, in the traditional sense. Instead, nirvanna the band the show is a new television series courtesy of Viceland – a wild, subversive, mostly unclassifiable work of new-media pastiche that might save its upstart network, cement the bona fides of its polarizing co-creator and, just maybe, revolutionize the Canadian television landscape.