I watched "The Amazing Digital Circus" web series, which made waves a few months ago for premiering its final episodes in movie theaters for two weeks and collecting a tidy sum at the box office. There are only nine episodes in total, which are all free on Youtube, so this didn't require much effort. I previously wrote up a few thoughts on the pilot episode a few years ago, as part of a post on independent web animation. My opinion was initially mixed, and is now a little more positive after watching the whole series, but only a little. Keep in mind that the show is for a young adult audience, and I am old and jaded.
"The Amazing Digital Circus" is about a collection of characters who discover themselves in a VR circus environment, under the control of a hyperactive AI ringmaster named Caine (Alex Rochon), who insists on making them all participate in a series of random adventures. It's loosely based on Harlan Ellison's horror short story "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," but the AI is more misguided and whimsical than psychopathic. The other main characters, including the newcomer Ponmi (Lizzie Freeman), are all humans who remember their former lives outside the circus, but can't figure out how to escape back to their real lives. They've all been given cartoonish digital avatars and silly new names, which contrast against the nightmarish reality of being trapped in a place where they have no control. Ponmi learns that the humans who become too unstable will "abstract" into corrupted forms, never to be recovered.
"The Amazing Digital Circus" looks like a low-budget children's program from the 2000s, the kind that used early CGI animation with high polygon counts. I do not find this visually appealing, but I got used to the style quickly. It makes sense aesthetically, given what we learn about Caine at the origins of the Circus. I was less happy to discover that the trapped humans are mostly a bunch of depressed young adults who have a tendency to broadcast their personality flaws and mental health issues. Ponmi, a jester doll, is meek and anxious. Jax (Michael Kovach) the purple rabbit is a bully and asshole. Ragatha (Amanda Hufford), the distinct-enough-from-Raggedy-Ann doll, is kindly but neurotic. Zooble (Ashley Nichols) is a collection of mismatched pieces who prefers to be uninvolved and blase. Gangle (Marissa Lenti) is an easily bullied sad-sack who looks like a theater mask and a tangle of ribbons. Finally there's the oldest member of the gang, Kinger (Sean Chiplock), a chess piece with a scrambled mind.
Most of the episodes follow some arbitrary task or adventure set out by Caine, and the characters' larger goal is to learn more about the Circus. However, it soon becomes apparent that the real point of the series is to make friends and become a found family in the face of adversity. Like many recent cartoons for older children and teenagers, "Digital Circus" features darker, emotionally fraught subject matter in (mostly) kid-friendly packaging, and ultimately it all boils down to examinations of self esteem and mental health. So, anyone trying to figure out how the Circus came about, or who's pulling the strings behind the scenes, or if there's some greater mystery to getting out of the characters' existential nightmare, will get a few answers but none that are very satisfying, because the show fundamentally isn't that interested in any of this. The edgy horror premise delivers a few fun shocks in the early going, but fizzles out as the stories get more character-based and touchy-feely. It doesn't help that the worldbuilding is basic, the narrative is arbitrary (the finale depends heavily on a villain just deciding not to be bad anymore), and the tropey characters spend most of their time caught up in internal rather than external problems. Only about half of the main characters get real arcs that allow for any development, and the storytelling is consistently very clumsy and self-indulgent.
And for an independently created web series, this is pretty common. Frankly, it's extremely impressive that Gooseworx and Glitch Studios managed to turn out a series this ambitious with the limited resources they had. And that it has achieved so much success and found such a rabid audience is very heartening, for those of us who want more independent productions in this vein. However, you can't get away from the production feeling very amateurish and uneven. I suspect that none of the major creatives involved have ever made anything on this scale before. The best thing I can say about "Digital Circus" is that it noticeably improves in quality over its nine episodes, even if it doesn't quite manage to pull off its transformation from an absurdist horrorshow that pushes edgy shocks in the pilot, to a more sincere melodrama that prioritizes wholesome feels by the finale. But it was good enough to leave me wanting more.
That's a pretty strong indicator that whatever Gooseworx does next will be worth watching.
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