So I recently watched The Amazing Digital Circus, and I loved it. Great animation, sharp writing, and excellent pacing. But despite its popularity online, none of my IRL friends have watched it yet, and talking to them helped illustrate something that slipped my mind as I watched the show: it looks goofy.
I quickly got used to it, but the show takes great care to make a world that is hard to take seriously, and that becomes the root of some interesting ideas. Violence is downplayed because there’s never any blood, the passage of time means nothing in the digital world, and of course, characters are easy to see as cartoon archetypes.
But with regards to characters, there’s layers to the strangeness. Everyone in the main cast looks silly, but Jax is based on old cartoons and Raggedy Ann has been in all sorts of shows and movies, so it’s not hard to accept these designs as belonging to a character with emotions. But I can’t recall any story that gives a design like Zooble’s to a person we’re supposed to care about. Yet the show treats them as a real person, and so do we. On the whole, it’s genuinely impressive that characters like Kinger and Zooble are as expressive and compelling as they are, and real skill in design, writing, and animation was needed to pull it off. (as a fan of bugs and other strange critters, it’s a lesson I hope more artists take to heart. You don’t need a human face to make a likable character, but it takes work!)
And it’s not just about the audience taking it seriously. Zooble’s dissatisfaction with their appearance is easy to understand given everything, and Jax often uses their ridiculous world as an excuse to dismiss it entirely. But the show still treats it all as real, and slowly both characters and viewers come to accept it. You stop seeing it as a edutainment-based virtual world, and it slowly becomes the world they live in. For now, at least. Who knows what episode 9 will hold?
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