Fantastic Fest review: Tenacious D hook up with a sex robot to battle Donald Trump Jr. in the demented Post-Apocalypto

We’ve come to understand that animation is a painstaking process. Every second of a Pixar film can take endless hours to put together, so a finished animated film can take years to be fully realized. Tenacious D’s Post-Apocalypto is decidedly not one of those films. Initially put together as a pitch to outlets like Amazon and Netflix for a fully animated series, Post-Apocalypto is basically a radio-play put over crudely drawn sketches that look like they came right out of the notebook of a horny sixth-grader.

Broken up into six episodes totalling an hour, Post-Apocalypto sees Tenacious D (Jack Black and Kyle Gass), the self-proclaimed “greatest band in the world,” navigating through a post-apocalyptic world (they survived by hiding in a conveniently located old fridge, just like in another major franchise). On their journey trough the Mad Max-like wasteland, they encounter a group of warrior women in search of their seed, a space station filled with Earth luminaries like Elon Musk and Richard Branson, a giant vagina monster, and a Terminator-like being / sex-bot sent from the future to guide them on their hilariously convoluted mission that sends them directly into the heart of darkness (Washington, D.C.) to battle KKK members and none other than Donald Trump Jr.

The plot gets increasingly loopy as the story progresses, which is part of the fun here. It almost sounds like Jack Black (who voices nearly every character) is simply winging it, creating bits of the story as they come to him (the often pregnant pauses seem to back that up). The fact that Kyle Gass had to then sit and painstakingly draw (however crudely) these scenes is pretty amazing, many of which feature the duo’s penises repeatedly entering various human and non-human orifices.

As silly and juvenile as much of this is, Post-Apocalypto still has a message of hope (also the name of the duo’s two-headed dog) from the D. It may be buried beneath the cavalcade of penis jokes, but at the heart of the story is a push for inclusiveness in these volatile times, and as a bonus, we also get to see hordes of Nazis and KKK members get mowed down by a sex-bot sporting a very poor Schwarzenegger impression.

While the drawings may make early South Park episodes look like a Studio Ghibli release, the episodes are ludicrous enough to keep things moving along, and also feature a number of new songs from the forthcoming Tenacious D studio album of the same name, serving as quasi-music-videos for songs like “Daddy Ding Dong” and “Cave Women.” Post-Apocalypto probably won’t win over any new fans, but longtime adherents of the D should eat these demented little episodes right up.

Post-Apocalypto episodes will stream on YouTube Red weekly, beginning on September 28th.