Every review of Buddy has clocked the aspect ratio. The kids’ show sequences are boxed into the old square television frame, and the movie eventually breaks out of it. Kelly’s reasoning, and the specific scene he built the switch around, is another matter.
He answered both at the Fantasia Q&A on August 1, after an audience member asked whether the ratio was doing real work. We were in the room for it.
Spoiler warning: the following describes a mid-film sequence and the closing scene.
Why Buddy Uses a 4:3 Aspect Ratio and When It Switches to Widescreen
Kelly’s first instinct was to apologize for the answer.
This is, I’m gonna sound pretentious… I think it does.
He said, before giving it anyway.
Part of the reasoning is what you’d guess. A late-nineties children’s program shot in widescreen would be wrong, and Kelly says he wanted the accuracy.
Felt like I had to do it to be accurate and I wanted to do it.
The rest is not about accuracy at all.
In the buddy world at that three four CRT ratio, it’s more claustrophobic.
Kelly said.
That reframes the whole choice. The square frame is not a period costume for the footage; it’s the wall of the room the children cannot leave. Which is why he hung the change on one specific action.
“When they go over the fence for the first time, it’s wide widescreen, like Oklahoma or something, you know, the musical,” he said, correcting himself a beat later. “Wizard of Oz. So it hopefully is giving people a feeling of they’re getting a little freedom.“
The fence lands around the middle of the film. Buddy has told the kids there are monsters on the other side. There aren’t. What’s out there instead is a whole world, plus a banished child and a leftover character from an earlier, western-styled version of the show. That earlier era is visible in the credits: Clint Howard plays George, a Howdy Doody-type cowboy puppet who had his own program alongside Michael Shannon’s ventriloquist doll, Willie.
So the widescreen is not simply a signal that we’ve left the show. It’s the moment the movie’s geography turns out to be much bigger than Buddy admitted.
Not Sure What to Watch?
Answer 4 questions, get curated horror movies to watch.
How Casper Kelly Made the It’s Buddy! Show Look Like Real 90s TV
The ratio is one piece of a larger instruction Kelly gave the production, which was to make the show sequences play completely straight.
He told No Film School in January that he kept telling everyone not to satirize it, because a program that already winks at the audience tips its hand. If the show is played as an actual artifact of its era, the break out of it hits harder. That same interview has cinematographer Zach Kuperstein working a lens so it used less of the sensor, producing a lower-res, distressed quality without period cameras.
The commitment ran into the puppets, where the production discovered it did not know how kids’ television actually gets made. Then it hired someone who did.
Cedwan Hooks, and his wife, Jimmica, now wife, they were engaged at the time.
Kelly said. Jimmica Collins voices Betty Bunny. Cedwan Hooks performs her in the suit, because it has to be two people. “So it was a married couple character.“
Hooks knew the field cold, down to the voice actors, and corrected an assumption the filmmakers had walked in with.
We didn’t know what we’re doing. We’re like, does the guy in the suit do the voices too?
Kelly said. “And he’s like, no. The microphone, it would never work. The sound would be horrible. So we just learned a lot from him.”
Hooks is credited on the film as puppeteer, suit fabricator and suit performance coach.
The Buddy Ending Scene One Producer Regrets Putting His Kid In
Buddy is built on nineties children’s programming, which was not Kelly’s own childhood.
“I watched a ton, tons of television, and I was more of a seventies-eighties kid,” he said. Scooby-Doo, mostly. And the claymation Christmas specials, which stuck with him for a reason he still finds funny.
“There was the one with Heat Miser and Freeze Miser. That really was interesting to me,” Kelly said. “Those guys control the weather.”
The nineties came in through his own kids, and the show world came together from other people’s memories as much as his. One of them cost a producer something. For the closing sequence, where children sit watching television while Buddy works to pull them into his world, the production needed footage of real kids in front of a screen, so it asked the crew.
One of the producers put his child in here.
Kelly said, “and he said, I regret doing that because I bawl every time I watch this movie.“
Buddy opens in theaters August 28 from Roadside Attractions and Saban Films.