What is it?
“The Amazing Digital Circus” is by far one of the most creatively jaw-dropping independently animated series that surfaced on October 13 as of this year. Produced by a digital animation company called Glitch Productions with the help of program creator Gooseworx, the animation was teased with a trailer released on September 22 and an official pilot episode released on October 13 on Glitch Productions’s YouTube channel with the same name. The Youtube channel is made up of the two talented creators Luke and Kevin Lerdwichagul. A few weeks after its release, the episode had gone viral, raking in 189 million views on Youtube as of the day I’m writing this article and gaining popularity across various platforms, including Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, X, etc. with various online creators cosplaying the characters, creating secondary animations based off of the original one, and coming up with various conspiracy theories on what could possibly be released in this show in the future.
Summary: What’s it about? (Warning: Spoilers are at bay)
To basically sum it all up in one concise sentence, “The Amazing Digital Circus” is a dark and satirical psychological horror American-Australian animation that details the inner world of a video game with the characters slowly growing insane from being inside of it. But let’s go deeper, shall we?
With tones of 90s retro video game consoles captured right at the beginning of the pilot episode, we first find ourselves reading the title screen of a video game called “The Amazing Digital Circus” before we seemingly break through the console screen and immediately zoom into a circus tent. Inside the tent’s interior, enclosed by red curtains, we are introduced by an announcement speaker about the ringleader or host of the circus game who is called “Caine” and his assistant/anthropomorphic bubble “Bubble” – no duh – and out they appear! Caine, is a denture toy with dichromatic eyeballs inside all tucked into a fancy business suit. As they say their names and converse with one another, the curtains unfold, revealing a magical and colorful world that you wouldn’t quite see in your average circus. The overall room is composed of warm and bright colors, the floor is made of a classic black-and-white-chess sequence, pipes seemingly shoot from the walls and connect to other walls and the floor, and pieces of an image of a sky are plastered everywhere, mimicking the continuous sky effect that 90s video games creators tried to replicate in their video game backgrounds by repeating the same pattern over and over again. Man, I could go on about this unique setting, but I digress.
With the theme song playing in the background, we are introduced to other video game characters that appear in the theater of the circus: Gangle, Zooble, Kinger, Ragatha, Jax, and Kaufmo, who is not in his current position in the theater during the spectacular musical number, huh odd. As the song continues, we learn that “day after day, we fly as the moon and sun (do) and we don’t know why”. The song glitches at a certain point and we begin to feel unsettled by what could possibly go wrong as the circus continues. It’s either that or maybe the animation is again trying to hint at the fact that it’s a 90s video game that consistently glitches when a player plays for a certain amount of time.
The musical number is untimely interrupted when a player enters the gamer server, or the theater of the circus. The unnamed player is a female clown with a spectacle jester outfit primarily composed of red and blue hues. As the player is confused as to where she possibly is, she bumps into the performers and they collapse in a domino chain sequence. Jax, a purple cartoon rabbit wearing red overalls, asks Caine if the new player is one of his NPCs. Caine answers by proclaiming that a new player has entered the circus realm. The confused and frantic clown responds by asking where she is and finally gets calmed down by the other players to explain herself. She explains that she put on a headset from the real world and found herself where she is now. Caine reassures her that she’s in a “world of wonders where anything can happen..except for swearing”. The players admit that they were just like her and got trapped in the game for far longer with Kinger staying the longest. In the end, the female clown assures herself that she’s probably dreaming. Caine decides to name the clown “Pomni” since she somehow can’t remember her own name and tours her around the circus: the Tent (the living quarters), the Grounds (the fair outside the tent), and the Void (a forbidden place that’s mysterious even to Caine). Side note, the moon outside the tent is in love with Caine, no comment. Moving on.
Even though exit doors appear everywhere throughout the circus, according to Caine, there is no “magical exit door”. After the grandiose tour, Caine decides to lead an in-door adventure called “Gather the Gloinks” where he explains with maniacal laughter that each player must gather all the “gloinks”, critters that collect anything they bump into. The gloinks take apart Zooble who’s a Mix and Match toy and carry them down a hole, Jax and Ragatha walk with Pomni to her dorms and check on Kaufmo, and Gangle and Kinger are left to handle the dissociated Zooble.
Jax and Ragatha, who’s a cartoon doll, lead Pomni down a hallway of dorms and tell her that the dorms are a place to sleep even though they don’t really need to sleep. Pomni asks Ragatha why everyone goes on adventures with no purpose to them, and Ragatha explains that it’s a way for them to distract themselves from going insane. They eventually walk to Kaufmo’s room – Kaufmo is a bowling pin-shaped clown – and find the door locked. Jax pulls out the key to Kaufmo’s dorm even though he shouldn’t have the keys to anyone’s room and unlocks the door. Inside Kaufmo’s room, the three digital midgets find a dark and distorted, crystallized pony creature with beady, colorful eyes all around it; surprise, surprise, it’s Kaufmo in an abstracted form, a form a character transfigures into when they’ve reached a phase of insanity beyond repair. Jax leaves, selfishly leaving Ragatha and Pomni behind. Pomni escapes down the hall but not before trying to save Ragatha who glitches in and out after being wrestled by Kaufmo Abstracted.
In the meantime, Kinger and Gangle stare down the deep chasm Zooble went down into and discuss what they’re staring at. Kinger is a king chess piece with a pair of blue eyes and Gangle is composed of red string and drama masks: the comedy mask is broken however. Jax returns to them and assures/lies to them that Kaufmo is in a very cheerful mood today. Jax pushes both of them down the hole and follows suit. They all slide down a long, red slide into a cave filled with gloinks and a monstrous creature that swallows the objects collected by the gloinks. The creature introduces herself as the Gloink Queen, and eventually digests the dissociated Zooble. The Gloink Queen eventually poops out Zooble and the characters
Pomni returns down the hallway, asks the glitching Ragatha if she’s okay, and runs out again to look for help. Along the way, she explores the circus and opens each and every door inside while being chased by Kaufmo Abstracted. Behind each and every door is a uniquely curated, fictitious world. She comes across another escape door similar to earlier and decides to enter it unbeknownst to Caine who probably should be looking after his circus buddies.
Eventually, she comes across an escape door that she decides to step into when no one’s looking, not even Caine. As she steps inside, she enters a yellow, dim, and dusty infinite corporate office hallway that seems to never end. Any escape door opens to another one and another and so on and so forth. As Pomni continues to try to “escape”, she begins to grow manic, this time, more than ever before. Finally, she enters a long office hallway and places her sight on a desk in a far corner of the room. On the desk, there’s a dirty, sullen computer and a VR set placed neatly on the desk. Something about the desk makes Pomni crack from hysterical madman laughter and causes her to rush to another office door. Behind this office door, Pomni’s face is now glazed in desperation and depression as the hallway before she seems to elongate and stretch beyond walking capacity. Finally, as if the hallway was alive from the beginning, Pomni makes it to the door and opens it, only to get sucked into the white-washed Void.
