Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared was originally a series of short YouTube videos, now it is on television screens everywhere. I am so glad that it finally gets more time to flesh out its concept and give us more of the experimental animation and existentialism themes that made the original videos so successful.
This show not only uses the concept of the uncanny valley as a tool in its puppet animation. Also, it gleefully revels the viewer’s distortion of reality. By the time you have become comfortable with the world and the characters in it, you are thrown for a loop each time.
Each episode plays out in a similar format, with the characters relaxing and then encountering moral lessons and horrors beyond their own understanding. Over the course of the season, the character “yellow guy” finds out that he isn’t real and that none of them are in control of their reality. He almost figures out what his purpose is and gains a temporary higher understanding, only to return to his earlier complacent state. Just to lose his one chance to break the cycle.
We go from enjoying their adventures in their little house to realizing they are all only puppets in control of a higher being within a dollhouse. By choosing to return with the knowledge of what is really going on, the “yellow guy” is willing to continue the struggle of his forced existence but refuses to embrace it.
Yet in the end, what he gained is lost as his old consciousness returned. While the puppet animation may be too much for some viewers, as well as the occasional gore and violence, the dark comedy and existentialism of the series proves its worth in the modern pantheon of successful television. It not only rejects what came before it but goes beyond to new things.
