Looking at some indie animation pilots…

Indie animation has been a thing online ever since the Internet got fast and sophisticated enough that you could store and show video files online… from crude Flash animations on Newgrounds to storytime animators and indie studios making animated content for Youtube. But with the rousing success of Glitch Studios and especially The Amazing Digital Circus, not to mention the much-discussed Knights of Guienivere and Please Please Please I Don’t Want to Be a Magical Girl. we’ve seen more and more indie animation pilots show up on Youtube.

So I thought, okay. How about I check out a few of them for myself and see if there are any gems there?

…sorry.I don’t really have anything funny or insightful to add here. Letr me just tell you about the pilots I watched, in the order I watched them:

 

 

Run Monster Run:
I LOVE this one. Three kid monsters live in a secret lab, raised by a benevolent AI and human “Overseers”. That is until they discover that the lab is there to experiment upon them to find the weakness of monsters, that humans can use in some human/monster war that’s apparently going on, and that the kid monsters are going to be killed afterwards. Naturally they revolt, break out and escape. This is an amazing pilot; it’s funny, dramatic and just a hint of disturbing, and the three main characters are all really strong personalities.

Eight episodes are planned, and DAMN I hope this goes to series, because it DESERVES a series.

 

Crooked City:
Definitely adult-themed; swearing and recreational drug use and topless women (though it’s Youtube so you don’t actually see anything). It starts out pretty dull and uninteresting, about a generic struggling musician, but it picks up interest around the seven-minute mark when the musician and has dog are dragged into the titular Crooked City, a place with anthro animals who swear and grow weed. It’s all very antio-establishment, anti-big corporation, and anti-AI, though it’s a little early to say if it actually has any sort of message besides “greedy corporations and corrupt politicians are like so lame, dude!”

Visuals are okay… the animals definitely look better than the humans. I like the villainous crow, he probably looks the best, though the horse with sunglasses is probably the strongest character. The music… eeeeeh. Not quite my thing. I could see myself checking out a second episode of this, just to see where they’re going with it, but I won’t consider it a huge loss if I don’t.

 

Planetronika:
…I’m not sure what that was. Best part of this is definitely the visuals; they got this early-2000 “thick-line animation” look with the main character having a vague “sexy anime girl” vibe. The animation on the two mains is lively, expressive and creative; like these people have really gone the extra mile to make sure this pilot is never boring to look at.

I just wish they could have handled the writing and comedic timing with the same amount of care, because the entire thing is just… “Oooh, wacky wacky wacky wacky ooooh sexy anime girl wacky wacky wacky wacky wacky wacky LOOK AT AT HER BUTT THATS ONE FINE ASS wacky wacky wacky wacky wacky wacky wacky wacky wacky wacky!” I mean a pilot is suipposed to be an intro to the setting and characters, and really all I know about this setting after watching this pilot is that the main character is really wacky and has a nice ass. Oh, and it seems to take place in some… alien… sci-fi… setting? I don’t know, it’s not very clear. Shame, because the animation IS pretty dang good.

 

 

Straggler & Snub:
Okay, this looks BEAUTIFUL. The foresty backgrounds are gorgeous, the character designs are great, the colours are really pretty, and while not all the shots are equally well animated, some of these shots are REALLY WELL done. So smooth. I mean, it’s a little too short and moves a little too quickly for me to really get a true feel for it… it’s less than four minutes, after all.

But even in that short time I feel like I know the premise of this a lot better than Planetronika: A teen and a young boy with a tail are wandering through the forest and have… the way they’re talking it seems like they used to live in a village but something happened that forced the villagers to leave and go find somewhere else to live, and these two have been separated from the others. The teen treats the boy like an annoying younger brother but clearly feels responsible for him. And there are these floating water fish and a mysterious dark-haired buy that aren’t explained but probably would be in an actual series. If there is a series, I’d probably check it out.

 

 

The Dollhouse Dolls:
Well, this isn’t even two minutes, and… um… grotesque-looking guys have a BDSM orgy or something, eating meat and brains, with sexy slaves dancing and making out and… crying tears of blood? And a cute pink-haired girl with an eyepatch comes in and says she needs to pee, and a… floating robot thing whose head is just a round screen with disturbing feminine lips floats up to her, says she’ll need to rank up in order to… do something… and if she causes trouble she’ll be modified, and then the pink-haired girl pees herself, the end.

What the fuck did I just watch? Looks like some dark pseudo-hentai anime where one scene has been taken out of context. I guess the visuals are good, but,,, WHAT THE FUCK DID I JUST WATCH?

 

 

Sadie’s Sweets:
…no, I’m not linking to this crap. Dead, soulless CGI characters who move like marionettes and speak like they’ve been written by ten year olds trying to pass for adults. Dollhouse Dolls, all is forgiven.

 

 

Next Friday: Magical Meow Meow:
So… anohter anthro series, but more kid-friendly and cartoony, about cat magical girls. After Sadie’s Sweets, this feels like an absolute masterpiece. Apparently it’s a student animation film that they’re hoping to turn into a series. The art style is pretty cute, with lots of personality and a distinct colour palette. There’s not a whole lot of consistency story-wise… I don’t get how this “duel class” is supposed to work, why the main character is taking it, why nobody’s objecting to her little sister interrupting the fights, or what what the point of it is, but…

…at least it has heart. I’d like to see what they could do with this premise with a bit more time to develop the setting and the characters.

 

 

Lajiao’s Holes:
Yes, of course my mind went straight into the gutter with this title. Unfortunately, we don’t get to see the titular character’s holes or know what sort of holes we’re even talking about, but it’s another anthro series, and… I gotta say, a lot of these indie animated pilots have some nice visuals. This looks great! …not REALLY sure how good an idea it was to open the episode with a plea for support before the episode even starts, though.

I don’t really have anything to say about this one. The storyline seems kinda… like stuff we’ve already seen a thousand times before in other series, with chosen ones and demons who want to gain their full power by defeating the chosen one, and dead fathers, and ancient traditions and… not REALLY sure what this offers other than the admittedly really good visuals.

 

 

The Bloody Mary:
It’s another CGI animated series, but it looks a million times better than Sadie’s Sweets. Maybe a little generic, but not unpleasant. I wasn’t really sure where they were going with this when it seemed like the main character was killed off in the first scene, but… I guess that was a fake-out? I’m not actually sure. Anyway, a girl and her demon friend who has no powers due to a botched summoning go ghost hunting in a creepy mansion and summon Bloody Mary… which ALSO seems to be a botched summoning… I’m guessing there’s more going on here.

I’ll admit, there were some plot twists I didn’t see coming here, and the interplay between the characters was actually pretty good. I’d need more episodes to see just what’s going on here.

 

 

Wastelandia:
Oh, hey, I know this Youtuber. So… another antrho series, this one about three roommates who bitch about their terrible days and then go out to watch the city burn in what I think is a reference to that “dog saying everything is fine while the house burns down around him” meme. Again, I think the characters are the best part, and this pilot has some pretty good dialogue too… I don’t know why, but I giggled at the phrase “the sun was shining, the birds were… birding”.

The main flaw of this is really that it’s too short. It kind of just cuts off with no resolution to anything. The roommates had bad days, and… that’s pretty much all. It’s more like the beginning of a story than an actual story. But as beginnings go, it’s pretty good.

 

 

Lake Effect:
This looks and sounds far less impressive than most of the other pilots here (except Sadie’s Sweets), and the writing is less polished than most of the others’ (again, except Sadie’s Sweets). It’s super rushed, the three characters have… like one personality between them if we’re being generous, things just kind of happen and nobody reacts to anything more strongly than a “huh, this is mildly inconvenient”. But the staff here is much smaller, and if this entire thing was really animated by one single person I have to respect that.

There is a core of something good here. With a few rewrites, more care given to characters and plot, and maybe a slightly bigger staff, we could look at something pretty special. As it is I’ll just have to label it “promising”.

 

 

The Rose Garden Shack:
Another small-staff one with seemingly one person being behind all the visuals… it’s less polished than Lake Effect but more expressive and lively. The best part here is definitely the male lead character; he’s actually surprisingly hilarious with his groundless positivity and he gets all the funniest lines. There are a few too many visual shortcuts here and the pacing could have been better, but… it’s kind of worth it for the main male character? I just really like that guy.

It’s definitely a very unique “odd couple” dynamic in that neither of the two leads is the straight man. I’d be interested in seeing how this develops.

 

 

Strawberry Vampire:
Okay, this is more an animatic, but hey, so was I Don’t Want to Be a Magical Girl and that was awesome. Besides, this is very well written with an instantly interesting premise: Strawberry vampires, who drink strawberry juice instead pf blood, who were being oppressed in their home country of “Strawbania” and so the main character and her family fled to the United States. In this set-up the vanpires are mostly stand-ins for immigrants… of the “kooky Eastern European” kind. It’s not particularly deep, but it’s charming.

Doesn’t hurt that the creator has worked on shows like Hilda, and you really get a similar vibe and feel.

 

And… oh, speaking of vampires, an honorary mention. It’s not a pilot, more like a trailer… but really, Regrettably my Boyfriend is a Vampire looks to be really fun. It’s essentially a PG-13 version of True Blood, without the sex and the naked tits but with a good deal more satire and comedy.

 

So, that’s a selection of the indie animation pilots on Youtube. There’s a lot of variation here.. let’s be real, the quality was varying wildly too… but I was very impressed with a lot of it. There are a number of them I would have liked to see series for.