The Amazing Digital Circus: Pilot

 "Do you like adventure, activity, wonder, danger, horror, pain, suffering, agony? Death, disease, angel food cake?"

I don't usually watch online animations made by younger creatiions, to put it mildly, but this one is splendidly disturbing and crammed with brilliant ideas... and it was introduded to me by Little Miss Llamastrangler. Who is nine.

Yes, Exactly. 

Circuses are, of course, nightmare fuel, so this pilot episode to what I  hope will be a series quite rightly leans into that. The existential horror is exquisite. Our POV character, Ponmi, puts on some headphones and finds herself stuck, seemingly forever, like her predecessors, in this circus-themes digital hell. Her predecessors are various degrees of insane, having slowly and painfully come to terms, of sorts, with their terrible fate, although some better than others. The cynical Jax, the meek Ragatha, the unconfident Kinger, the utterly broken Zoobie. 

The perfect touch, though, is that their captor and ringmaster, Caine, is not even malevolent or evil, but has no conception of the pain he's suffering, always maintaining the air of the cheerful and, indeed, family-friendly compere. This is far more effective than having a malevcolent antagonist would have been. Cruelly, the idea of an "exit" is dangled in fromt of our poor Ponmi, only to be cruelly taken away. She, like all of them, has forgotten who she was in her "real" existence... but, of course, as with The Matrix and Roger Zelazny's Amber series... what is "real" existence anyway?

If, like me, this isn't normally your thing but you like the sound of it, check it out for free on YouTube. It's only twenty-five minutes long, and it's brilliant.