Category: Oglądałki

On how a colorful YouTube cartoon demolished my prejudices, and what I learned about myself along the way.

Dashie, this is all your fault.
Thanks.

I was only going to watch the pilot. A friend says: check it out, you’ll like it. I say: fine, one episode, I’ll tell you tomorrow what I think. I stayed up all night and inhaled the whole thing. In the morning I couldn’t say a word. I was completely floored, and it took a while to shake it off. Shortly after, I fell into the algorithm’s trap, which fired off its flood protocol after that session. That’s how I found out I’d be going to a cinema for the grand finale of this thing. But how, exactly? An independent YouTube “cartoon,” in theaters, in a simultaneous worldwide premiere of its finale? Let me explain.

I’ll say it plainly: I was a snob. Not an aggressive one, more the soft, comfortable kind — the almost-forty-year-old snob, raised on Star Trek, a fan of serious SF with a fairly crystallized hierarchy of what counts as good and worth attention. And a colorful cartoon about clowns from YouTube? Please. I keep telling myself I have “broad horizons,” and yet, somehow…

And then in walks my friend, all in white, with exactly one argument: inspired by Ellison. I have no mouth, and I must scream.

If that name and title mean nothing to you — which, given where this text has ended up¹, I doubt — take it from me: in 1967, Harlan Ellison wrote one of the cruelest stories in the history of science fiction, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. Five people trapped in eternity by an artificial intelligence that hates them and won’t let them die. The title is exact. The text is short. You finish it carrying something you can’t just set down the way you’d set down a book.

My friend tells me that’s what inspired someone to make a cartoon about clowns. First instinct: no, that has to be a misunderstanding, someone skimmed a Wikipedia page. Second instinct: fine, but if even one percent of that is true, I can’t let it go. Even a surface-level nod promises something at least worth a look.

So I fired up that pilot. The first two minutes are exactly what I’d pictured. Bright colors. Slapstick. Pomni — the protagonist — looks like a walking error in color theory. The animation is fast, dense, heavily stylized. Everything screams: this is going to be silly and grotesque, don’t take us too seriously!

Five minutes in, Pomni has a panic attack. Not the cartoonish, comedic kind, with bugged-out eyes and steam from the ears. A real one. With that specific breathing pattern anyone who’s had a panic attack — or watched someone close to them have one — will recognize instantly. The camera doesn’t cut away. The clowns don’t crack jokes. Caine — the ringmaster of this circus, a character whose entire aesthetic is absurd — looks at her with an expression he can’t quite form, because he was never programmed to form it.

I understood two things. My friend was right about Ellison. I had been a fool.

Because here’s the thing: TADC isn’t good despite that aesthetic. TADC is good because of it. Those are two different things. If someone made the same story live-action, in gritty brutalist grime, with grainy cinematography and rain against the window, you’d get another decent, sad sci-fi thriller that we’d watch once and file next to Black Mirror. A faithful adaptation, brutally so. Maybe still Ellison, maybe still the same skeleton underneath, but it would reach us through a channel we’ve already armored ourselves against. We know how to watch dark, heavy sci-fi. We have filters for it. We have distance.

TADC doesn’t recognize those filters. It attacks from the other side — the one we don’t even think to guard. The adult genre-fiction viewer has a reflex, one I caught myself in the act of: a colorful little cartoon about clowns is, by definition, harmless. You can watch it. You can joke about it. Nothing’s going to happen to you. You can let your guard down.

And then cartoon Pomni has a panic attack, and Kinger — a character built to play the cheerful fool — turns out to be a study in grief so specific and so complete you have to wonder whether the writers were quietly sitting in on someone’s therapy sessions. And after the next two episodes you realize there’s no walking it back, because the series has, quietly and with full premeditation, dropped a handful of questions in your lap that you never wanted to ask yourself. What does it mean to have an identity you didn’t choose? What happens to a mind trapped in a situation with no way out? Does a consciousness that forgets it was ever conscious still count as one? Questions Ellison was asking sixty years ago. In the leotard of a digital clown. Under a layer of rainbow and cartoonish absurdity lies real psychology and solid dramaturgy.

For the record, this isn’t the first time contemporary Western animation has smuggled serious material under the costume of a harmless doodle. Other Glitch Productions shows — Murder Drones, or the newer Knights of Guinevere, which doesn’t take inspiration from the House of Mouse so much as take aim at it — run on the same mechanism. So do Vivziepop’s Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss. All of them, to varying degrees, have independent roots. The last several years have been a quiet renaissance of the form — one that an adult SF fan should have noticed a long time ago.

Although… no. Writing that the West is “only now” arriving at this would be dishonest. Bakshi was making adult animation back in the 1970s — Fritz the Cat, American Pop. Heavy Metal came out in 1981 with a soundtrack people still listen to today. Watership Down, The Plague Dogs. Adult animation in the West has at least half a century of history. It just always lived in a niche — midnight screenings, film clubs, thick monographs available only to people willing to dig for them.

What’s changed isn’t the form, it’s the channel. The mainstream spent sixty years being raised on Disney, which trained a simple reflex into viewers: animation is a fairy tale for kids, you can relax your guard. Bakshi could make whatever he wanted — but his films never had a shot at the same couch where parents put on The Lion King for their kids. Today they do. Not because Disney softened, but because YouTube shrank the distance to the viewer down to a single click. Bakshi had to fight for every shelf. Glitch and Vivziepop don’t have to anymore.

The East has been doing this for decades. It’s enough to mention Akira, Neon Genesis Evangelion, or Grave of the Fireflies: for them, animation as a medium for adult content is a starting point, not a discovery. We in the West are only now getting there, and by a path that routes around the big corporations. I say this without any triumph, because I’ve just been handed a lesson in humility on the subject. It’s just worth knowing that TADC isn’t some strange outlier. TADC is a well-made, visible peak of something growing underneath.

The best proof that something’s happening doesn’t come from critics or fandom — it comes from the industry. TADC’s finale is going to theaters first, only reaching YouTube afterward — with a two-week theatrical exclusivity window, the way Hollywood handles its big premieres. In the US, distribution is being handled by Fathom Entertainment, the joint venture of the three biggest multiplex chains: AMC, Cinemark, and Regal. In Poland, Cinema City and Helios — Polish dub, subtitled version, dozens of cities. An independent YouTube cartoon is hitting the big screen on June 4th, simultaneously in dozens of countries worldwide. What was, two years ago, a free series for teenagers, is today a theatrical event distributed by the same people who release Marvel blockbusters. Criticism is following suit, and so is fandom — more and more often, these productions get discussed in the same terms as books and live-action film: character psychology, drama, motifs. This isn’t a surface-level shift. Animation is stopping being a genre. It’s starting to be a medium — like live-action film, like literature, like anything else.

I come back to the skeptic I was a few weeks ago with something I haven’t told myself in a long time: you were wrong, buddy, and it’s a good thing you finally understood that. I don’t want to close this column with a call to “you absolutely have to watch this” — it sounds like a propaganda leaflet. I’d rather go another way.

Think about what you’ve recently bounced off of, only because it looked wrong. What colorful little squiggle, what strange cover, what title that smelled like something “not for you.” And whether someone happened to drop one name, one reference, one keyword that told you this thing wasn’t at all what it looked like. And whether you ignored that word along with everything else. Because I did. Until my friend said one word: Ellison.

And now, eight half-hour episodes later, I’m waiting for June 4th, rattled to my core. If I’ve talked any of you into it — let’s sit down over a beer sometime, when we see each other, and tell me what it’s like once you know everything. I still don’t know, myself. And honestly, right now, this state of not-knowing feels strangely precious to me.

1. Published in the 2026 edition of Łącznik Ciemności (Liaison of Darkness), a members-only zin of Ad Astra, a fandom club in Poland. ↩︎