Top 5 David Firth Animations to Melt Your Brain
The cliched first introduction to horror is usually late-night television showing old flicks of masked men butchering teenagers, or smuggled tapes of slasher classics brought out at a sleepover illuminating the room while pre-teens crowded around the TV with the volume turned down. However, in the age of the internet the first exposure to dread came from short animations on Newgrounds.com.
Enter David Firth: Creator of Salad Fingers. That’s how he is usually billed whenever his name is brought up around the web. Everyone who grew up in the 2000s with a broadband connection knows what Salad Fingers is. The 2005 animation hit Newgrounds and became virus: a macabre meme of a disfigured green man with long dangling fingers searching for the orgasmic texture of rusted spoons. This 3-minute cartoon was some of the first exposure to randomised discomfort that most millennials had.
David Firth has been creating animations on his Website Fat-Pie.com since the beginning of the millennium and has built an impressive catalogue. So, here’s five animations to break your brain and get your heart thumping with a handy viewing suggestion for each and links to where you can watch them yourself: set and setting are everything, don’t you know?
Sock 5: Three Skins Without Men
One of the prime influences on David, and how he structures his animations, is from dreams. Sock is a series created entirely from snippets of his dreams (imagine spending five minutes in this guys dreams) and Sock 5 is one of the most haunted and longest of the series. Photo-realistic animation blends with an eerie synth soundtrack leading us through distorted characters, flying Grannies, a man sniffing his human skin collection, negotiated suicide, and all topped of with a compelling French musical number sung by an eldritch insectoid dog.
If you’re a fan of the ‘wtf did I just watch feeling’ then this will hit your right in the veins. Gore ridden lucidity that rocks you into a sense of detached horror is a must for any fan of online weirdness. Strain through the bold strangeness of this animation and you’ll feel awash with a sense of familiarity, not with the images themselves, but the dream like structure of the piece. When we recall our dreams we usually remember scenes, chunks of dialogue and random events rather than a start to finish detailed scene. Sock 5 brings back the essential quality of lucidity that dreams give the dreamer, but in this case, it’s more a nightmare.
Suggested way to watch: Right before bed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miQrzviTPQg
Salad Fingers 10: Birthday
All episodes of Salad Fingers are masterpieces, this series made Firth’s name, but the tenth entry in the series is by far the most unsettling. The whole series should be watched, but there is no reals sense of continuity, so feel free to just jump in at number 10. The feeling after watching this cartoon is much akin to the grey void Salad Finger’s dwells in: Empty, upsetting, and yet the viewer is compelled to press the replay button when the final credits roll. Narrated by Salad Finger’s northern burr we see the Protagonist (?) celebrating his dear dead friends birthday. The schizophrenic nature of Salad fingers means that being a corpse doesn’t phase him so much. Cue in a crude puppet of a doctor butchering a horse and a gore laden visit from Mr Finger’s fractured personalities and any fan of horror should be pleased.
Suggested way to Watch: During Netflix and Chill
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdPnMcvmaMc
Sock 3: 10 Different types of Soup
Another from the Sock series is just as fractured and nonlinear as the rest of the series. A short, but impactful cartoon shows hazy scenes and fractured dialogue placed at random next to one another. The pace moves slow enticed by the staple synth backing tracks that stretch the eeriness and unreality of the piece. The dream structure buries itself in your psyche with snippets of dialogue staying with you years after watching it. Splattering violent acts, eternal dark fires forever burning, and singing suited pandas will allow the viewer to write their own meaning into this work, any Freudians out there should really have their Superegos turning with this one.
Suggested viewing: First thing in the morning upon awaking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO9A76_5yIo
Dog of Man
Now, as entire YouTube playlists of reaction videos can attest, this animation is guaranteed to traumatise. A simple story of a man and his dog on the search for contentment…by growing deadly body tumours. The body horror is ramped up to the max with self-mutilation, gungy growths, and head foggy weirdness.
Dog of Man became a viral meme through sheer upsetting strangeness. You’ll feel your face scrunch and your mouth agape after this one, and then ponder endlessly on the meaning behind this slice of oddness fed directly into your eyes.
Guessing the subtext of Firth’s work is a subgenre in its own right with hundreds of speculation videos, blog posts and comments dissecting and decoding every frame of animation of ‘Dog of Man’. My interpretation? Plastic Surgery? Body dysmorphia brought to a gory literalism? The tannoy voiced dog being a metaphor for media pressure dictating our own self-perception ? I don’t know. What do you think?
Suggested viewing: Home Movie night with the family.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o31pmwWNUww
A Black and White Cartoon about Berries
I saw this when it first hit Fat-Pie.com when I was way too young. I didn’t have my own computer at home yet, but I did have a library card which let me use their IT section (typing that sentence made me feel like a 700-year-old man). You’d think that gore ridden disturbing animation would be blocked, but lucky for my impressionable psyche, it wasn’t. Morbid pen-scratch web animations wasn’t on Net Nanny’s radar.
This is a prequel to ‘A Black and White Cartoon about Roof Tiling’, but the structure of both animation isn’t linear, it’s as fractured as titular character’s (Johnathon) mind. B&WCAB is a snippet into the decaying mind of a serial killer who lives with his mother on a small Berry croft with only a talking crow as a companion. The whole animation is unsettling from start to finish, sound tracked with a maddening symphony from Firth’s own musical project Locust Toybox. One watch will easily show why it’s taken the first spot. Sweet Dreams.
Suggested viewing: In the blackness of your bedroom before bed.
