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Don't Hug Me I'm Scared

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Don't Hug Me I'm Scared
Official poster
GenrePuppetry
Horror comedy
Animation
Surrealism
Created byBecky Sloan
Joseph Pelling
Country of originUnited Kingdom
Original languageEnglish
No. of episodes6
Production
Production companiesTHIS IS IT Collective (episode 1)
Blink Industries (episodes 2-6)
Original release
NetworkYouTube
Vimeo
Release29 July 2011 –
19 June 2016

Don't Hug Me I'm Scared (often abbreviated to DHMIS) is a British animated surreal horror comedy web series created by filmmakers Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling. It currently consists of six episodes, released from 29 July 2011 to 19 June 2016 through the artists' website, and later to YouTube and Vimeo.[1]

Each episode starts like a typical children's series, consisting of anthropomorphic puppets akin to Sesame Street, but eventually takes a surreal plot twist in the climax, usually set with psychedelic disturbing content involving graphic violence and jump scares. However, at the same time, the series parodies children's shows by ironically juxtaposing puppetry and musical songs against mature content. The six episodes explore the subjects of creativity, time, love, technology, healthy eating, and dreams.

Plot

Each episode revolves around Yellow Guy, Red Guy, and Duck Guy meeting one or several anthropomorphic characters, who begin a musical number related to a basic concept of day-to-day life with an upbeat melody similar to that of a nursery rhyme. As each song progresses, it becomes apparent that its moral or message is nonsensical or self-contradicting, and that the "teacher" character has ulterior or sinister motives. The climax of each episode typically involves a shock element with use of graphic violence, and sometimes other coercive or warped themes.

Episode 1: Creativity

The first episode begins in a kitchen where the main cast is eating breakfast. A singing sketchbook teaches the main characters to "get creative", singing about childlike activities. The climax of the episode is an exaggerated depiction of 'creativity' in which the puppets dance increasingly erratically and engage in deranged acts like covering a heart in glitter and serving a cake made from viscera, complete with shaky camera shots and increasingly frantic music. The video ends with everything seemingly restored to normal and the sketchbook telling the puppets to "never be creative again".[2]

Episode 2: Time

A talking clock, Tony, sings about time.[3] The protagonists question the reality of time, to Tony's annoyance. Tony then accelerates the passage of time, rapidly aging the cast and causing them to decay alive. Red guy becomes old and his fur turns grey, while duck guy and yellow guy begin to rot alive, with duck guy's eye falling out. The events are revealed to be part of a television programme watched by the three friends, although the end implies the rotting was real due to duck guy's eyeball being visible by the television. Also, yellow guy's hair is visible during the end credits, with maggots appearing to multiply on it.[4] This episode introduces Yellow Guy's father, Roy.

Episode 3: Love

At a picnic with Yellow Guy and Red Guy, Duck Guy kills a butterfly. Yellow Guy, distressed, flees to a tree and is found by a butterfly, Shrignold. He and his friends sing about love, saying that true love is kept for one's 'special one'. After a brief anecdote featuring 'Michael, the loneliest boy in town', Shrignold then introduces Yellow Guy to Malcolm, the 'King of Love', and the leader of a cult whom they worship by feeding gravel to him. The plot takes a sinister turn when the cult explains that he must lose his memories and name. The video ends with Yellow Guy waking up where he started, and his friends bringing him an egg which splits, revealing a maggot-like creature who calls Yellow Guy "father" and is promptly squashed by Duck Guy.[5]

Episode 4: Technology

The protagonists are playing a board game. They express their desire to learn about the World, and a globe named Gilbert comes to life. He prepares to sing to them, but Colin, a talking computer, randomly begins to sing about how clever he is, cutting Gilbert off. Throughout the song, Red Guy expresses frustration at his questions not being answered and promptly slams Colin's keyboard. This enrages Colin and makes him take the characters to the 'Digital World'. Colin sings about the "Three Main Activities of the Digital World" – viewing different graphs, Digital Style, and Digital Dancing. These are repeated until a room becomes populated with distorted dancing clones of Colin, Yellow Guy and Duck Guy. Red Guy escapes only to find a film crew wearing spandex suits apparently filming a crude replica of the first episode. A crewman snaps a clapperboard, whereupon Red Guy's head suddenly explodes into glitter.[6]

Episode 5: Healthy Eating

The other two main characters seem unable to understand that Red Guy is missing, although they are aware that something has changed. Various characters led by a steak gives increasingly bizarre and self-contradictory advice about eating habits in song. The song is stopped twice by the telephone ringing. Duck Guy answers the telephone, but does not respond to what he hears on the line. Eventually, he becomes irritated and runs off-set, knocking over the camera. He wakes up in an operating room to find a large tin can eating his organs. Yellow Guy continues following the song and becomes bloated from eating cans of meat labeled with Duck Guy's picture. During the credits sequence, Red Guy is seen dressed in a coat and scarf, walking away from a phone booth carrying a suitcase,[7] revealing he was the one calling throughout the episode. The creators claim that a phone number printed on the phone booth in this video was being called within seconds of the episode's release, which at first they would answer and pretend to be characters from the show.[8]

Episode 6: Dreams

Yellow Guy is in bed, crying because he misses his friends. As he tries to go to sleep, a lamp who sings about dreams appears. Despite Yellow Guy's protests, the Lamp drags him along for an animated sequence that ends with him having a dream about drowning in oil. Yellow Guy then wakes to see the Lamp transform his mattress into oil. Red Guy wakes in an office with multiple other red people wearing clothing. He starts to sing a song about an office file, but his colleagues are not impressed. Later, at a bar, he performs the Creativity song from episode 1. The crowd starts booing. Red Guy notices Roy in the crowd. The microphone and boombox turn into teacher-puppets and he is transported to a dark black room. Red Guy follows the sound of the dream song to a machine with monitors showing Yellow Guy. Red Guy presses buttons that transform the lamp into other characters including Tony and Colin. Roy taps Red Guy on the shoulder with a massively elongated arm. Seeing Yellow Guy becoming gaunt from his ordeal, Red Guy disconnects the machine's power supply. The scene cuts to a reshoot of episode 1 with the protagonists recoloured to their favourite colour from Episode 1. The calendar turns from 19 to 20 June. A sketchbook starts singing the same song from the first instalment but is cut off as the episode ends.[9]

Characters

  • Yellow Guy — One of the three main characters. He has a childlike demeanor. He is the most optimistic and naive of the three puppets. He wears blue overalls and has long blue hair. He becomes increasingly aware of the events taking place around him in the later episodes.
  • Red Guy — One of the three main characters. Unlike Yellow Guy and Duck Guy, Red Guy is portrayed through the use of a person wearing a costume. He speaks in a monotonous voice and shows little emotion to the occurrences he and his friends experience.
  • Duck Guy[10] — One of the three main characters. He is the most verbose character. He frequently theorises about or questions what he sees.
  • Sketchbook — Educates the puppets about creativity. It is voiced by series co-creator Becky Sloan.
  • Tony the Talking Clock — Educates the puppets about time.
  • Shrignold[11] — A talking butterfly who teaches the Yellow Guy about love in the third installment.
  • Colin[12] — A talking computer who teaches the puppets about technology in the fourth episode. Voiced by series co-writer Baker Terry.
  • Roy — Yellow Guy's father and "sponsor" as seen in the credits.
  • Malcolm — The "king of love" whom Shrignold and his friends worship. He is burned in the credits of episode 3, but later makes a cameo as small ornaments around the puppets' house.
  • Michael — The "loneliest boy in town" whose story is described in episode 3.
  • Gilbert the Globe[13] — The globe in episode 4.
  • Fridge — Introduced in episode 5, this character has no given name.
  • Steak — Introduced in episode 5, this character has no given name.
  • Can — Appeared in episode 5. It has a green label on its body (a can), with green "leaves" sticking out of its lid and mouth.
  • Bread Boy[14] — Appears in the fifth episode.
  • Giant Can — A human-sized tin can who ate the organs of Duck Guy in episode 5.
  • Lamp — Appears in episode 6 as a teacher.
  • Money Man — The man seen holding the characters hostage in the Kickstarter campaign.

Production

Sloan and Pelling met while studying Fine Art, and Animation respectively at Kingston University where they started THIS IS IT Collective with some friends.[15] They produced the first episode of Don't Hug Me I'm Scared in their free time with no budget. When they started on the project they imagined making it into a series, but initially dropped the idea after finishing the first episode. After the short film gained popularity, they decided to expand it into a series.[16] Channel 4's Random Acts commissioned the second episode. The show soon attracted mainstream commissioners, but Sloan and Pelling turned them down because they "wanted to keep it fairly odd" and "have the freedom to do exactly what we wanted."[8]

In May 2013, Sloan and Pelling announced that they would start a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to make four or more additional episodes, one every three months, starting in September 2014. They uploaded low-quality camera footage of the characters being taken hostage and held for ransom.[17] A 12-year-old American boy tried to use hacked credit card information to donate £35,000 to the campaign, but he was caught and those funds were thrown out.[18] Their Kickstarter goal of £96,000 was reached on 19 June 2014, and in total £104,935 was raised.[17] Youtuber Thomas "TomSka" Ridgewell became an executive producer on the series after donating £5,000 to the Kickstarter.[19]

In January 2016, Sloan and Pelling collaborated with Lazy Oaf to release a line of clothing based on the characters and themes of the show.[20]

Reception

The original short film became a viral hit and the series grew to become a cult phenomenon. The six episodes have so far amassed 94.6 million views on YouTube.[21][when?] Scott Beggs listed the original short film as number 8 on his list of the 11 best short films of 2011.[22] Carolina Mardones listed the first episode as number 7 in her top ten short films of 2011.[23] It was also included in as part of a cinema event in Banksy's Dismaland.[24][25] In April 2016, the main characters of the series were featured on the cover of the magazine Printed Pages, along with an "interview" of the three main characters written by the magazine's editor.[26][27] All six episodes of DHMIS were included in the September 2016 festival XOXO.[28]

Drew Grant of the Observer wrote that the series episodes are "horrifying nightmarish absolutely beautiful" and "mind-melting".[29] Freelance writer Benjamin Hiorns observed that "it's not the subject matter that makes these films so strangely alluring, it's the strikingly imaginative set and character design and the underlying Britishness of it all."[30] Joe Blevins of The A.V. Club praised the show's "sense-to-nonsense ratio" and its production values.[31] Samantha Joy of TenEighty praised the sixth episode of the series, writing that it "creates a provocative end to a pretty dark narrative about content creation."[32]

Themes

Pelling, when asked about how the film came about, said that the purpose was "how not to teach something" and "how an abstract concept like creativity is kind of stupid when people try to teach it in a limited way that [they] do". In addition, he comments on how the video is open for interpretation, and how, when different people reach different conclusions about the video, they may all be valid in their own right.[33]

A student writer for Nouse compared the appeal of the first episode to themes in Gothic literature, arguing that they are both "tapping into the same cultural fear of a violent subconscious hiding beneath the facade of normality."[34] In The Wesleyan Argus, another student writer called the series a "fine example of the era of esotericism" and noted that, "There is a building meta-commentary on the relationships between viewer, perception, creator, participant, and art (and perhaps death) that began with the first episode, but what that commentary is trying to say is not yet entirely clear. However, there is an absolute sense that the series is building toward a culmination."[35]

Creators

Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling are British graphic designers, artists and animators. Their advertising runs through commercial productions.[21] The duo have worked as part of the THIS IS IT Collective.[36]

Their content consists of videos, graphic design art, animation, music, and working with real-life materials to resemble things in the real world as art.[37] They have won multiple awards, including the 2012 SXSW Midnight Shorts Award,[38][39] and the 2016 ADC Young Guns award.[40]

Future

On June 19, 2017, a year after the release of episode 6, Sloan hinted towards additional work into the Don't Hug Me I'm Scared series.[41]

References

  1. ^ Sloan, Becky; Pelling, Joseph (3 March 2014). "Awards. Festivals. Talks". Becky & Joe's Art..
  2. ^ "Don't Hug me I'm Scared". 29 July 2011. Retrieved 16 October 2015.
  3. ^ "Becky&Joe are this week's Dazed Visionaries". Dazed. 6 January 2014. Retrieved 27 May 2014. The sequel introduces a character called Tony The Talking Clock who teaches the puppets the subject of Time.
  4. ^ "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared 2 - TIME". 8 January 2014. Retrieved 16 October 2015.
  5. ^ "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared 3". 31 October 2014. Retrieved 16 October 2015.
  6. ^ "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared 4". 31 March 2015. Retrieved 16 October 2015.
  7. ^ "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared 5". 14 October 2015. Retrieved 16 October 2015.
  8. ^ a b Coldwell, Will (27 January 2016). "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared: the puppets who sing, dance and eat raw meat". The Guardian. Retrieved 17 April 2016.
  9. ^ Don't Hug Me .I'm Scared (19 June 2016), Don't Hug Me I'm Scared 6, retrieved 25 June 2016
  10. ^ "CGI designer Jack Sachs via Instagram". 1 April 2015. my brief silver screen debut as duck guy in Don't Hug me I'm scared 4
  11. ^ Sloan, Becky (2 November 2014). "his name is... Shrignold". Twitter. Retrieved 13 June 2016.
  12. ^ "Becky Sloan on Twitter". Retrieved 3 July 2016.
  13. ^ Sloan, Becky (20 January 2015). "Hey.. Who's this guy?! It's Gilbert the Globe!". Twitter. Retrieved 13 June 2016.
  14. ^ Sloan, Becky (15 October 2015). "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared on Instagram: "Bread Boy #donthugmeimscared #dhmis"". Instagram. Retrieved 20 June 2016.
  15. ^ Dazed (6 January 2014). "Becky&Joe are this week's Dazed Visionaries". Dazed. Retrieved 19 June 2016.
  16. ^ Boult, Adam (26 October 2015). "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared: Interview with creators Becky & Joe". Metro News. Retrieved 17 April 2016.
  17. ^ a b "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared : The Series by Becky and Joe". Kickstarter. 20 May 2014. Retrieved 27 May 2014.
  18. ^ DiGangi, Christine (25 June 2014). "12-Year-Old Used Stolen Credit Cards to Fund Puppet Show". Credit.com. Retrieved 17 April 2016.
  19. ^ "TomSka pledges £5K to Don't Hug Me I'm Scared series – TenEighty — YouTube News, Features, and Interviews".
  20. ^ Shin, Nara (18 January 2016). "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared + Lazy Oaf". Cool Hunting. Retrieved 17 April 2016.
  21. ^ a b "Becky & Joe". Blinkink. Retrieved 17 April 2016.
  22. ^ Beggs, Scott (30 December 2011). "Year In Review: The 11 Best Short Films of 2011". Film School Rejects. Retrieved 17 April 2016.
  23. ^ Mardones, Carolina (3 March 2012). "Seleccionan los 10 mejores cortometrajes de 2011". biobiochile.cl (in Spanish). Retrieved 17 April 2016.
  24. ^ Jobson, Christopher (20 August 2015). "Welcome to Dismaland: A First Look at Banksy's New Art Exhibition Housed Inside a Dystopian Theme Park [Updated 8/22]". Colossal. Retrieved 17 April 2016.
  25. ^ "Watch: Banksy Dismaland Preview & Short Film Program". Slashfilm. 26 August 2015. Retrieved 17 April 2016.
  26. ^ "Printed Pages, s/s 2016". magCulture. 26 April 2016. Retrieved 4 May 2016.
  27. ^ Pritchard, Owen (3 May 2016). "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared - an exclusive interview with Duck, Red Guy and Yellow Guy". It's Nice That. Retrieved 4 May 2016.
  28. ^ "Our favorite discoveries from the internet's best festival". The Verge. Vox Media. 11 September 2016. Retrieved 15 September 2016.
  29. ^ Grant, Drew (3 February 2015). "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared: This Series Will Break Your Brain and It Will Be Magic". Observer. Retrieved 17 April 2016.
  30. ^ Hiorns, Benjamin (16 October 2015). "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared by Becky & Joe launches to solve world problems". Creativepool. Retrieved 17 April 2016.
  31. ^ Blevins, Joe (7 July 2016). "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared has been baffling the internet for five years now". The A.V. Club. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  32. ^ Joy, Samantha (27 July 2016). "Five of the Best: YouTube Animations". TenEighty. Retrieved 16 August 2016.
  33. ^ Gilbert, Jan (1 May 2012). "Directors of Short Films at Sundance London". Sundance London. Retrieved 17 March 2014.
  34. ^ Licht, Jordan (22 October 2013). "When YouTube gets dark". Nouse. Retrieved 17 April 2016.
  35. ^ McGhee, Will (22 October 2015). "'Don't Hug Me I'm Scared' Melds Comedy with Horror". The Wesleyan Argus. Retrieved 17 April 2016.
  36. ^ "About - This Is It Collective". cargocollective.com. Retrieved 25 June 2015.
  37. ^ "Project Focus: Becky & Joe for Tame Impala". YCN. Archived from the original on 13 February 2013. Retrieved 17 April 2016.
  38. ^ "FAME". BECKY AND JOE'S ART. Retrieved 25 June 2015.
  39. ^ "SXSW Film 2012 Award Winners". Retrieved 25 June 2015.
  40. ^ "Art Directors Club Announces 2016 ADC Young Guns Winners". Animation World Network. 14 September 2016. Retrieved 15 September 2016.
  41. ^ Sloan, Becky (19 June 2017). "It's June 19th!! Big DHMIS news coming in the FUTURE... #DHMIS #donthugmeimscaredpic.twitter.com/5bsjJz3wPv". @BeckyBocka. Retrieved 20 June 2017.
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