It's bizarre and brilliant. Australian animated show 'The Amazing Digital Circus' is grown-up slapstick with a large layer of home truths.
It’s so bizarre that watching this show is more than just an acquired taste.
But, like a snifter of scotch whisky, debuting on the rocks… once you’ve settled into it, The Amazing Digital Circus is an incredible watch of crazy, life truths and imagination.
There are four episodes of The Amazing Digital Circus available on Netflix, and all six completed instalments are watchable on YouTube.
The pilot, released two years ago, was an instant viral hit for the Australian-produced animated series.
The series feels as if you are stuck inside a video game built on torturous ideals and the cast of six humans with somewhat weird names, Pomni, Jax, Ragatha, Gangle, Kinger, and Zooble, are trapped inside a circus-themed virtual reality, AI-type environment.
Their world is ruled by Caine, a hyperactive ringmaster. He’s drawn as a set of teeth, lips and eyes in between. Jollied viciousness incarnate. He pushes the cast into absurd, nonsensical quests that have no real endpoint.
It feels like complete mayhem at first, but the adventures and tasks are really distractions because for Pomni and company, there is no way home.
If they lose focus from the tasks at hand, they can go “abstracting,” where they glitch into monstrous digital whatnots with no trace of their own humanity left.
Imagine living in a virtual world
Pomni, the most recent arrival in the gang of six, narrates the tale to the audience.
She’s wide-eyed, panicked, and desperate to find a way out. Jax thrives on mischief, Ragatha clings to kindness, Gangle struggles with broken masks that reveal their emotions, Kinger is all about paranoia, and Zooble hides vulnerability behind layers of armour.
Each character’s idiosyncrasies and nerves show how the circus and the tasks from the AI ringmaster serve as both a coping mechanism and a mirror for their own internal strife.
The Amazing Digital Circus is for grownups, without a doubt. It’s intellectual and farcical at the same time.
The show drills home life truths in every episode. Watching it can feel like a therapy session, because the themes are universally true. And it’s relevant to all of us on some level or another. Especially the anxiety that the twenty-first century serves up to everyone, time and time again.
And then, there’s not so much the lesson, but the truth, symptoms and causative reasons for why we feel how we feel.
And, of course, a liner to help the characters, as much as the audience, figure it out, somewhat.
Watch the trailer
Kids can enjoy it too; teenagers may find it particularly relevant and enlightening.
The bad words are beeped out because they add to the aesthetic of the show. So, it’s kind of safe, but there are many, many adult themes woven in between, including notions of a sexual nature.
For younger children, editing what they are or may be exposed to may be a good idea.
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Visually, the animation draws on the clunky, clumsy early computer animation of the 1990s.
The characters are distorted line-items in a Halloween lineup. But the style of animation and the characters as they are give the circus an unsettlingly cheerful veneer amidst the emotional and mental chaos.
There’s a lot of humour, but bubbling underneath is the horror bottom line. It’s a study of identity, sanity, and what people cling to when everything they know has been torn into an unsolvable set of shards.
The Amazing Digital Circus is fantastic on all levels. And while it is not everyone’s cup of tea, it nags home truths like a boxer would an opponent.
The humour is dark, witty and considerably slapstick at the same time.
The creativity that it must have demanded to come up with this absolutely one-of-a-kind show must have been immense.
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