This Week in Anime

Under the Digital Big Top

Lucas
Coop, the mandate of heaven is shifting! While much of the entertainment landscape has catered to Baby Boomers and Gen Xers over the past half century, media made deliberately by and for young Millennials and Gen Z is on the rise this summer! The viral internet phenomenon The Backrooms is in the midst of a terrific theatrical run, and my fiancée has gone to see Obsession, a movie explicitly informed by the experiences of dating as a young person today, twice now! And, of course, kicking off this summer trend is the theatrical run of the finale of the internet phenomenon, The Amazing Digital Circus, which grossed more than US$36 million!

Created by writer and animator Gooseworx and released via the Australian indie animation studio Glitch Productions' YouTube channel, this series first premiered in October of 2023 and quickly became a hit in internet fandom circles before breaking into mainstream success! With the series wrapping a little less than two weeks ago and discourse around the finale and larger work still rolling, I'd love it if you weighed in on this very obviously anime (and gaming...and classic sci-fi) inspired work with me!

It's not at all surprising to me that TADC is a hit with the Japanese domestic or international anime crowd, considering the show straight up was a slice-of-life anime for a hot second there! While I suspect merch being widely available in Japan is a consequence of this being a stealth-Australian production and therefore WAY less cost-intensive to get merch into East Asian territories, that financing strategy also tracks with what across broader stretches of the animation industry. It's no secret that most Japanese anime bank on merchandise sales to remain profitable, and a lot of American cartoons still function as glorified toy commercials to make bank. While this kind of revenue structure can be creatively stifling and motivate creatives to make "marketable" characters over affecting ones, we all know this isn't true about TADC.

By the end of its run, it's hard for me to view this show as anything other than deeply personal and emblematic of some of the most challenging interior struggles that people are dealing with today, and it's genuinely uplifting to see that this story and these themes are apparently universally appealing.

(Even though I think The Amazing Digital Circus doesn't quite rise above its influences, I can save my very mild and reasonable criticisms for later in this chat!)

Similarly, this is a show that seemed to spring into existence across my social media accounts overnight. While I think I was vaguely aware of Glitch Productions due to my passing interest in indie animation, TADC definitely elevated the studio. I think I started watching the series as new episodes launched, beginning with episode two, but I don't think the show really clicked with me until episode five or so, when it really had its characters figured out and started making the most of its influences.

While decidedly made for older children and up, TADC is technically a horror spin on the "trapped in a video game" setup that's been popular in anime for decades now. Though instead of an MMO or Dragon Quest rip-off, TADC visually quirky but largely grounded cast is stuck in a video game world evocative of Humongous Entertainment's 90s and 2000s children's games like Freddi Fish, which the show pays pretty direct homage to.

Which is a long way for me to say that I thought The Amazing Digital Circus was a high budget creepypasta based on 90s touchstones and Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream right up until it started explicitly engaging with the daily horrors of existing in the 2020s, like late-stage capitalism, deteriorating personal relationships, and being too traumatized to engage with the queer parts of your own identity. Then I really started vibing with it!

Oh, I couldn't agree more, Coop! The heart and internal exploration of these very relatable and recognizably banged-up characters is the secret (not stupid) sauce that's made this show such a hit! Unfortunately, TADC prioritizing these elements while using the horror-tinted and mystery-box heavy mode of storytelling that's common on the internet as a way for audiences to easily approach the series is also why we're seeing so much heated debate around its ending.

People wanted to see how deep the iceberg they had theory-crafted around the show went, and instead, the closing few episodes are a rumination on the human experience, and how people need to make the most of imperfect, or even bad, situations with the community around them lest they lose themselves entirely to despair. I'm not the first person to make this comparison, but the ending of TADC is VERY evocative of the ending of the original Evangelion's and lord knows people still have OPINIONS about that anime today.

Though I should also note now that a part of the discourse around TADC's ending involves bad faith readings of the show that refuse to acknowledge that Jax is a trans woman. To weigh in on that segment of discourse, I'd just like to say: wow, I was not expecting to get 4chan repressed egg representation in TADC, and I love this brutally honest exploration of how living a closeted life and being anything less than your authentic self will slowly kill you through a cycle of spiraling alienation.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't even bring up fake fans being butthurt about a piece of media, but I really am bummed by how much oxygen these folks take out of the room every time something from the internet turns into a life-changing project for the creators involved. I would much rather focus on what The Amazing Digital Circus actually does well — effectively capture the various expressions of millennial and zoomer malaise and prove that the future of 3D animation is in the hands of independent creators, and poorly force a feel good ending for the surviving cast while leaning heavily on imagery from other queer media (like I Saw the TV Glow) rather than find it's own. But rather than engage with those ideas broadly, we're stuck in another round of fandom wars.

Of course, us doing this more considered column and the conversations that it will hopefully inspire are proof those raging against the show are little more than a vocal minority, but man do I wish we could spend more time about what makes TADC, or any work like it, so interesting and special and where the folks inspired by it can improve in their own projects.

Between how well the theatrical release of the finale did and how much TADC merch I'm expecting to see at Anime Expo and throughout the rest of the con circuit, a Blu-ray release of the series would CLEAN UP! Especially with younger demos rediscovering the advantages of physical media, I could see that being the go-to gift next holiday season!