A Savage Art review (2025)

November 22, 2025 Jeffrey Lyles A Savage Art, Pat Oliphant

A Savage Art is an engaging and insightful look at the career of political cartoonist Patrick Oliphant, a creator who reveled in “stirring the beast.” The timing of the documentary is ironic as free speech continues to be threatened or cancelled if it goes against the easily offended in power.

Director/co-writer Bill Banowsky uses a mix of his own interview footage as well as archival footage from other sources, included 60 Minutes, to tell the story of Oliphant, an Australian native whose fascination with art evolved into a storied career skewering lawmakers.

Oliphant is a reserved interviewee offering scant details as he reflects on his life. The best stories come from family members, including his second wife, Susan Conway, and his son, Grant and peers and colleagues.

Those interviews prove far more enlightening in learning more of the backstory of a young man whose greatest claim to fame in his childhood was being the nephew of physicist Sir Marcus Oliphant, a peer of Robert Oppenheimer.

Grant Oliphant explains that his father sought to make his own name, which he accomplished initially in a roundabout fashion as a copy boy for an Australian evening tabloid. That role eventually led to a stint drawing political cartoons and Oliphant never looked back.

To help establish A Savage Art chapter breaks, Banowsky utilized animated sequences featuring Oliphant’s mainstay character in his comics — Punk the Penguin. Punk certainly seems like the inspiration for Berkeley Breathed’s Opus in his Bloom County strip, which also regularly lampooned political figures starting in the 1980s.

While having a keen sense of quickly summarizing controversial issues in his mid-20s, Oliphant’s mindset was not shared by the editors of the tabloid. Oliphant was inspired by the growing sense of bravery and fearlessness exhibited by some political cartoonists and the irreverent MAD Magazine.

Yearning for more freedom to illustrate what was really on his mind, Oliphant moved to Denver with his first wife, Hendrika DeVries, and his two children.

A Savage Art weaves in archival interviews with Oliphant to provide a better sense of his mindset earlier in his life. Young Oliphant didn’t have much of a filter and was upfront with his beliefs such as his displeasure over the strip used for his Pulitzer Prize win.

Although the strips tell the stories just fine, Banowsky adds a little extra visual and audio sizzle with appropriate sound effects and deliberate panning to convey how the strip would be read. Banowsky has a good sense of how much pizzaz is needed without the animation and sound effects becoming a distraction.

Oliphant’s career spanned over the tenure of 10 U.S. Presidents. Of the bunch, Richard Nixon was one of his favorites to roast as some of Oliphant’s most inspired work came at the expense of “Tricky Dicky.” Oliphant shared the backstory of why Gerald Ford had a bandage in every strip followed by a humorous montage of Ford slipping and falling.

Besides the ever-expanding row of teeth, Oliphant didn’t batter Jimmy Carter too much. Oliphant opined that he thought Ronald Regan was a regrettable choice and felt Bill Clinton had something to hide. A Savage Art features more montages showing both Regan and Clinton’s walking back previously firm statements declaring their innocence to various accusations.

G.W. Bush was portrayed as a president too small for the role while Barack Obama was the rare president to seemingly earn Oliphant’s respect based on the strips featuring the first black president.

Donald Trump is ignored in the presidential roundup section. A Savage Art shifts to the threat to freedom of speech citing Rob Rogers, who was fired as an editorial cartoonist for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for his Trump-bashing comics.

Other political cartoonists, including Adam Zyglis and Ann Telnaes, speak on the rising threat of censoring free speech in the newspapers. Ironically, Telnaes announced her departure from The Washington Post over the paper’s efforts to curry favor with those who want to control the paper’s content.

A Savage Art also looks at the 24/7 news cycle and explores how memes have become the political cartoons of the moment to suggest Oliphant thrived at the perfect moment in history for his talents.

This is a solid documentary with an ideal subject whose boldness and willingness to savagely satire heads of state and top decision makers helped to stoke the flame of the next generation of political disruptors.