My kid has introduced us recently to some of the indie animation series put out by Glitch productions—namely Murder Drones and The Amazing Digital Circus (TADC thereafter)—which have got her absolutely, obsessively, maddeningly captivated. I’m finding them both refreshing in their earnestness to tell a good tale, as well as their quality of craft, but TADC in particular I’m enjoying as a really thoughtful and unfettered meditation on the long, and also astonishingly brief, arc of the late 20th–early 21st century collective psychosis that we’re calling the internet life.
Same kid is also wanting to join the Stranger Things party (never too late), so we watched the first episode of the first season tonight. The contrast between Stranger Things confected and assembled pastiche of pre-internet 80’s nostalgia, up against TADC’s more hallucinatory deep cut of digitally-mediated humanity, from the dawn of 90’s CGI through to the present AI singularity, felt so resonant to me. Or TADC feels like a set of prayer chimes, and Stranger Things is a brash gong.
I’m really feeling it, but the words aren’t quite there for me right now. But I think what director Gooseworx and the Glitch crew are expressing and grappling with in TADC is some really essential, attuned shit about what it is to be, right now. I remember being quite entertained by Stranger Things’ first season, but despite all the very finely-crafted sense of place, one could quite literally be anywhere while watching it—they’re both shows that are centered around characters being imprisoned in sinister alternate dimensions, but I feel like TADC is the braver piece of art eliciting questions about how we got there, and where it’s going.
At any rate, kudos to my stepdaughter for cottoning us all on to _TADC; _clearly the kids are going to be alright.