The Missing Link (French: Le Chaînon manquant), known in America as B.C. Rock, is a 1980 French–Belgian animated film written and directed by Picha.
Set in the year 196,303 BC, it follows the life and escapades of the caveman Oh. Rejected by his own kind, he travels the world with his two companions — Igua the sauropod and the Croak the pterodactyl. Determined to find his place in life, Oh meets strange new friends and enemies, and learns and develops the skills needed to survive this harsh world. The film is set to a rock soundtrack.
Note that, for some reason, in the English translation every single moment is filled with background music and a first-person narration even where the original was silent.note This is not necessarily a bad thing, since the additional dialogue sometimes adds to the story,note but the original and the translation make for very different viewing experiences.
Not to be confused with The Missing Lynx or the former pro wrestler known as the Missing Link, nor with the 2019 animated film Missing Link.
This film provides examples of:
- Adorably Precocious Child:
- Oh as a newborn baby bites through his umbilical cord, ties it off, then ties off his brother Ah's umbilical cord.
- Croak hatches from his egg fully cognizant and able to speak — in fact, he speaks better than Igua, who uses similar stilted You No Take Candle speech as Oh.
- All Cavemen Were Neanderthals: Somewhat justified, as the film shows the transition between Neanderthal and Homo sapiens.
- Anachronism Stew: Aside from Man and dinosaurs existing at the same time, there are ants that inexplicably buy and sell (human-sized) Marlboro cigarettes. Also, the No-Lobes have agriculture millennia ahead of time, though it may be justified in that they are not human.
- Artistic License – Paleontology: Not only are there dinosaurs and humans in the same time period, but they don't even look like real dinosaurs. Hell, some of them don't even look like they are from Earth.
- Bittersweet Ending: Man develops into a more civilized society, at the cost of wiping out various other species in the process. Also, Oh rejects Man in disgust at their behavior, is rejected by "his" No-Man, and spends the remainder of his days on Easter Island with Igua and Croak.
- Ass Shove: When Oh meets a dragon who complains about how he's constantly spurting fire from his ass when it's supposed to come out of his mouth, he tries to help by shoving a cork into the dragon's butthole. Although the dragon is understandably ticked at first, he's actually grateful when it works."He stuck a cork up my ass!"
- Later, humans shove burning torches up triceratops rears to make them charge into no-lobes as bowling-ball-like weapons.
- A Boy and His X: A boy and his Brontosaurus, specifically. Oh and Igua meet literally at birth and immediately become surrogate brothers, with Igua saving Oh's life after they're thrown into the sea to drown. Igua...somehow... rapidly outgrows Oh and becomes Oh's primary caretaker, and Oh returns the favor by doing his best to look out for Igua once he's grown up. Unfortunately, eventually Oh comes to the realization that he and Igua aren't the same people, and after a fight, Oh goes off looking for other Man. Igua initially lets him go in a jealous sulk, but comes to regret it and goes looking for him.
- Beast Folk: The "No-Man's" are a race of all-female red feline creatures with long, whip-like tails.
- Been There, Shaped History:
- Oh unwittingly caused Adam and Eve to be cast off the Garden of Eden.
- The war between humans and every other creature is what caused continental drift.
- The statues on Easter Island are either images Oh made to be less lonely in his exile, or Oh's attempts to immortalize the No-Lobes and other races whose deaths he caused by giving Ah fire.
- Cast of Snowflakes: The men in Oh's tribe are barely recognizable as belonging to the same species as each other. Averted with the tribe's women, who look remarkably alike, and with non-human species such as the No-Lobes.
- Cat Girl: The No-Mans are essentially a blending of woman and cave-lion, and mostly resemble naked Nubile Savages with furry hides, long tails, digitigrade feline legs and paw-like hands. Their behavior is a weird mixture of feline and womanly behavior, in particular using seductive posing and flirtatious purrs to distract prey.
- Cats Are Mean: When Oh first meets a No-Man, she drags him back to her pride. It's unclear if she meant to serve him to them as food, but when the pride's matriarch rejects him and the pride tries to attack Oh, this one No-Man ends up helping him to escape. The rest of the pride angrily pursues the two of them for a notable portion of the movie.
- Cigarette of Anxiety: Parodied when Oh and Ah's father is waiting for his mate to give birth; he chomps on a stick, eventually biting through it and spitting it onto the ground near a bunch of other, similarly gnawed sticks, in clear homage to the old "anxious expectant father chain-smoking" trope.
- Cluster F-Bomb: At one point, Oh tries to take shelter in what he thinks is a tree, only for it to turn out to be a giant chicken that carries its nest between its thighs like a set of half-removed panties and which repeatedly screams at him to "Fuck off!" Oh wisely does as he's told.
- Crapsack World: It is the dawn of man, after all. Humans are stupid, feeble, weak creatures, surrounded by larger, smarter and fiercer predatory beasts. Even when Oh teaches them things that makes humans less stupid, they instead use their newfound advancement to become brutal murderers.
- The Dividual: The No-Lobes all look identical, have the same voice in at most slightly different pitches, and talk either in perfect unison, or in a chorus of four No-Lobes repeating the same point in different phrasing.
- Dumb Dinos: Inverted. The dinosaurs are smart, while humans are dumb.
- Dumb Is Good: Zigzagged. Oh is naive and vocally stunted compared to the dinosaurs and other weird races he interacts with, but he's clearly smarter than his caveman ancestors, coming up with multiple surprisingly clever plans on the fly and even figuring out how to make wheeled vehicle and artificial wings. He's also shown as compassionate and eager to make friends, even breaking down in tears when he sees some No-Lobes die and get buried despite how the No-Lobes rejected him earlier. In contrast, Oh's elder twin brother Ah isn't as smart as Oh, and is downright evil. To the point he rallies Man to engage in wars of genocide.
- Eat Dirt, Cheap: Invoked and subverted for laughs; in the opening sequence, one of the hungry cavemen assembles a burger-like cluster of three rocks, bites into it... and knocks out his teeth.
- Eaten Alive: At one point, Oh is captured by a civilization of ants that starts slowly devouring him, one ant bite at a time. Luckily for Oh, he manages to snap to his senses and fight his way free.
- Establishing Character Moment: Shortly after he's born, Oh severs his umbilical cable from his terrified mother and ties it off, then upon hearing his older twin Ah's wailing he crawls over to him and ties his dangling umbilical off, clearly trying to help him. Ah promptly slaps him across the face.
- Evil Twin: Ah is Oh's twin brother, but is vicious, cruel and xenophobic. After Oh gives the caveman tribe fire and an increased population, Ah rallies them to butcher the other intelligent races of the world, starting with the No-Lobes, just for their not being human. To make absolutely sure that viewers grasp the implications, the scene of Ah rallying the cavemen quickly becomes an obvious reference to Nazi rallies, with Ah and his followers throwing each other Nazi salutes. The good/evil divide is even reflected in their character designs, with Oh having bright pink skin with orange hair and looking relatively human, while Ah is black-haired, red-skinned, and looks more like your stereotypical evil caveman brute.
- Fartillery: Played for laughs twice.
- Shortly after Oh leaves Igua, he ends up falling into a body of water and being swallowed by a Clam Trap. Luckily, Oh promptly farts, disgusting the clam so much it spits him out.
- Late into the movie, Oh encounters a dragon whose problem is that he can only shoot fire out of his ass and not his mouth. Oh helps him out, but the dragon regrets it when it results in him constantly flying off backwards as he uncontrollably spews fire out of his mouth.
- Filling the Silence: The English translation, as mentioned above.
- Humans Are Bastards: Near the end of the film, Man goes around wiping out all other creatures for no other reason than "Man no like no-man!"
- Hulk Speak: The cavemen speak like this. Oh, Igua and the other sauropods too, in the English and French versions. Oddly enough, most of the other animals have perfect grammar.
- Humanoid Female Animal: The "No-Man" race resemble a blend of human woman and lioness.
- I'm a Humanitarian: Oh and Ah's father sends one of the cavemen to attack a strange monopedal humanoid elephant creature in the early part of the movie. When he botches the attack and it kicks him to death, the rest of the tribe promptly eat him.
- Intellectual Animal: Many animals throughout the movie. Heck, humans are considered among the dumbest things around.
- Interspecies Romance: Oh loses his virginity to an unnamed "No-Man". While he is clearly infatuated with her, the punishment she receives from her own tribe for mating with him causes them to be separated, and this combined with the massacre of her tribe by Ah's humans leads for her to reject him at the film's end.
- Inventing the Wheel: The No-Lobes invented them... And they lay them flat on the ground to use as sleighs. Oh has the idea to set them vertically, but the No-Lobes don't appreciate this innovation, largely because his first experiment ends up knocking over a pile of harvested crops, and they throw him out of their community. Oh later invents the concept of a car by attaching four No-Lobe wheels to a hollowed giant tortoise shell.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Croak the pterodactyl, who likes to tease Oh and Igua, as well as being presented as something of a bad influence on Oh, but does help Oh at several points, including teaching him how to walk as a baby and rescuing him from several dangers.
- Kaiju: Oh's attempt to escape from the kingdom of the ants is played as a parody of the typical city-smashing rampage of a giant monster, including multiple references to King Kong. Ah and his forces tearing down the kingdom as part of their conquest of the primeval world similarly evokes a kaiju attack.
- Naked People Are Funny: All of Man are naked.
- One-Gender Race:
- The "No-Man's" are an all female race of long-tailed humanoid lions.
- The No-Lobes all look vaguely like human men, although they are shown to lay eggs.
- Only One Female Mold: While human men in Oh's tribe are considerably diverse in appearance, human women look very similar to each other. In a change of pace from typical examples of this trope, the women look more like the Venus of Willendorf than Nubile Savages.
- Our Dragons Are Different: There's a dragon in one scene that farts fire and is voiced by Bill Murray.
- Out with a Bang: In the initial sequence, a male stegosaurus is shown mating with a female, only to end up cutting itself in half on her spinal crests in the process, with the female shaking off the split halves and blood.
- Panicky Expectant Father: Oh and Ah's father is shown very anxiously waiting for his mate to give birth, and being very excited to see his sons... well, his first son Ah, at least.
- Painting the Frost on Windows: When the No-Lobes are introduced, they're shown carving boulders into smooth, rounded rocks and placing them into a stream. When Oh follows them to their eating site, in the English translation, they sing about how Mother Nature made them to "keep things clean and bright". When Igua walks past some No-Lobes whilst searching for Oh, they promptly begin filling in his footprints.
- Phlebotinum Killed the Dinosaurs: The dinosaurs go extinct via mass suicide due to the humans going around wiping out other species.
- Pun-Based Title: The German title "Das fehlende Glied" is a perfectly literal translation...but with the bonus (if one can term it bonus, but after all, Picha is renowned for his adult animations) that "Glied" also means "penis".
- Prehensile Tail:The No-Mans have long tails that they can use like prehensile limbs; they mostly use them to gesture and touch others, but "Oh's No-Man" is shown using her tail to bind Oh and force him to follow her to her pride, and even to lift him over to the pride's leader. The matriarch of the pride cuts off her tail as punishment for helping Oh escape and then mating with him.
- Rodents of Unusual Size: Rats are as big as dinosaurs in this age. They shrink to their current size when humans declare war on everybody else, presumably out of fear.
- Shout-Out: In a scene where Croak flies carrying Oh, music from Star Wars plays.
- At one point Oh throws a bone in the air a la 2001: A Space Odyssey, only to be hit on the head when a "No-Man" distracts him.
- Swallowed Whole: Oh gets eaten by a giant shark at a point. He not only survives, he lights a fire in its belly Pinocchio-style — which causes the shark to blow up and fly like a hot air balloon — and he later get out from the *ahem* other end, completely unharmed.
- That Thing Is Not My Child!: Oh's appearance terrifies his caveman tribe, to the point his own mother tries to run away from him after having given birth to him, and his father promptly throws him into the sea to drown. Meanwhile, Igua's mother throws Igua's egg into the sea after the wailing and screaming from Oh's panicking tribe causes her to lay Igua's egg in a peanut shape. Luckily, the two crash into each other as they fall and the impact hatches Igua, who promptly rescues Oh from drowning.
- Too Dumb to Live: The opening sequence shows that Oh's tribe are so stupid, they don't even know how to properly have sex. Oh and Ah's father only figures it out after he spots a male stegosaurus mounting a female, and one of the innovations that Oh brings back to his tribe after his journey is how to actually have sex.
- Top Heavy Behemoth: One of the cavemen at the start of the film is a huge, powerfully built figure who walks around on his hands whilst his small, stubby legs are kept curled up uselessly underneath him.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Oh teaches his tribe how to have sex and, more critically, to make fire, use clubs & spears, and even make carts, giving them the numbers and the technology they need to declare war on every non-human.
- Workaholic: The No-Lobes are an entire race of these, to the point that the English translation of the song they sing when Oh finds them notes that it's great that they never get weekends off, and they would only spend them working with friends anyway if they did.
