Not Your Average Saturday Morning Cartoon

November 19, 2011 1:45 AM

What do you give a spoiled brat who has everything? His own monster, of course. "My Bloody Lad" is two manic minutes of imaginatively morbid mayhem* from a team of four French student animators who call themselves Dead Walter. SLVimeo for now, but we'll be seeing more from these warped toonsmiths for sure.
* probably enough cartoon gore and ghoulish content to earn an NSFW on the weekend
posted by oneswellfoop (10 comments total)

Huh...
posted by ZaneJ. at 2:32 AM on November 19, 2011

Comeuppance - insufficiently awful.
posted by louche mustachio at 2:36 AM on November 19, 2011

Also -what I see here talented student animators with a lot of potential that would benefit from richer storytelling - either from better writers or from more experience themselves.

There is a habit among student animators to go directly for violence for comic value. It's understandable, because animating violence is, frankly, fun. But actually incorporating it into a story and having the brutality play as comedic rather than simply distasteful is deceptively difficult and requires a sense of nuance, timing, and ethical clarity that most people, let alone those intoxicated by their own sense of mastery, possess.
posted by louche mustachio at 2:51 AM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]

NSFL (unless you happen to be able to tolerate "dubstep").
posted by e.e. coli at 3:10 AM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]

What do you give a spoiled brat who has everything?

A job at Burger King?
posted by louche mustachio at 3:40 AM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]

These guys watched too many Skrillex videos with killer children.
posted by benzenedream at 7:45 AM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]

The story wasn't written well enough to be funny, the gore wasn't funny, either, and didn't even add any shock value. It was merely there. I did find the abbey road/ Beatles heads amusing, though.
posted by FirstMateKate at 8:37 AM on November 19, 2011

.... I liked it. Loved the design and the animation. I agree that the storytelling could have been beefed up a little bit, but as a series of dark gags, it was pretty good -- and I thought the timing/transitions were both neat. Especially the transitions. And the snapshot sequence was pretty funny -- both the Abbey Road bit and the prostitution one.

Didn't care for the end -- I actually would have liked it if the brat DIDN'T get a comeuppance. But that's just me, I guess.
posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me at 11:16 AM on November 19, 2011

Should have had a cutscene where the monster chases the little boy through the showers of a locker room
posted by Renoroc at 1:42 PM on November 19, 2011

Too soon.
posted by Nomyte at 5:11 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]