Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on October 2013

More than 20 years after England’s premiere surreal comedy troupe lost one of its founding members, fans can revisit his life with the animated film A Liar’s Autobiography: The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman. So why now? “Partly because we have only just discovered the tapes he left behind,” says Ben Timlett (pictured far right with co-directors Bill Jones, Jeff Simpson and original Python, Terry Jones). Timlett grew up around Monty Python, literally, after he discovered that his classmate was the son of Terry Jones, but was too young to know Chapman, who died of cancer in 1989. “When we did a documentary series on them, we got the sense of what an enigma Graham is,” he recalls. “He is sort of the forgotten Python, as he didn’t have the opportunity the others had to do what they wanted later on.” The tapes, an early attempt at an audio book, resurfaced, allowing Timlett and his team to mix Chapman’s voice with 3D animation from 14 different studios. “Because Graham goes into such incredible flights of fancy, we thought we could switch styles to emphasize that,” the director explains. “And it is a way of trying to get the tone of where he was in his life at the time.” And Chapman’s life went through major shifts of tone, from studying medicine to battling alcoholism to being one of the first British celebrities to come out as gay on a TV show his mother happened to be watching. The surviving Pythons lent their voices to the project, as did fan Cameron Diaz, who is cast in the role of Sigmund Freud.

A Liar’s Autobiography will be released in Japan November 23.