A guide to understanding the animated Chris Bosh movie

Any time you can make an animated movie involving wolfman spirit guides, Mike Miller, the Miami Face-Eater, Wes Borland from Limp Bizkit, one of the stars of Summer Catch, the person who made “I Am Your Grandma,” Hennessy Youngman and, of course, Chris Bosh, well, you do that.

If you’re not already completely lost, good on you. But for those of us who aren’t as familiar with those elements, the “Adventures of Christopher Bosh in the Multiverse” may have been a bit dizzying.

Let’s start at the beginning.

The Borscht Corporation or Borscht Film Festival, which are pretty much the same thing, focuses on emerging filmmakers and artists in Miami. It was started in 2005 and has served as a relative pipeline to other prestigious festivals and museums. In other words, it’s a pretty great project with some really talented people involved.

Let’s let Lucas Leyva, one of the founders of Borscht, tell the story here.

“Most of us are longtime Heat fans,” Leyva said, “like the kind that used to pay actual money to see Wang Zhi Zhi play. The Bosh Film Festival started as an April Fool’s joke where we issued a press release stating that Bosh donated one percent of his salary to us and we renamed our festival after him. We were fans of Bosh and thought if there was any player cool enough to use one percent of his salary (which would cover most of our operating budget) on a nonprofit arts organization instead of jewelry or something, it would be Bosh.

Also, Borscht is a dumb name anyway, so people would believe we would change it to Bosh.

A year later we decided to make a real website for the fake organization, but liked the idea so much we decided to make a real event.

The Miami Art Museum hosted the Bosh Film Festival on December 14th. It was a free event where anyone could bring a projector and play anything they liked on the walls. A man in an alligator costume sang “I Will Always Love You” and “I Believe I Can Fly.” It was beautiful, but Bosh didn’t show up.”

I don’t understand why Bosh wouldn’t show up, but that’s beside the point there.

Here’s where things get interesting. The website for the festival was designed by Bleeding Palm, a Miami artist, animator and filmmaker who focuses on alternate realities and satire. Fitting right in with the rest of his work, the site is more than a little surreal.

Somewhere in the process, the website evolved into a film project.

“I’m really into fantasy and sci-fi,” Bleeding Palm said. “I thought it would be funny if [Bosh] was this weird crazy space god. I wanted it to be a fun unexpected experience for people. I also definitely wanted people to be confused by it.”

“From the website grew the idea for the film, so we wrote a screenplay for it and went from there.For the most part, it was in pieces and a complete mess. It really came together during one crazy non-stop week and a very intense editing session that lasted about 40 hours in which Lucas Leyva died and was resurrected. The voice and music trickled in throughout which helped to keep us going.”

The result was a film that intertwined actual events (Bosh’s injury and return during the playoffs, as well as the causeway cannibal) with supernatural and sci-fi and some not so subtle hat tips to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Christopher Bosh comes to Earth to save everyone, the evil Jillian (played by artist Jillian Mayer) tries to unleash the power of the internet to destroy every dimension. Bosh is aided by his friend the Mystic Wolfman Barfar (played by Jaysonn Musson aka Hennessy Youngman) and the guy who had his face eaten also helps along the way. Also Mike Miller makes an appearance after being inhabited by the Mystic Wolfman to make a bunch of three-pointers. And Matthew Lillard is in it. And Wes Borland wrote music.

The Wolfman had this to say about the project:

Hopefully that clears up some confusion about “Adventures of Christopher Bosh in The Multiverse.” Watch it. Support art. Love basketball.