Jason Steele, creator of Charlie the Unicorn
by Titus Daniel Gee
Charlie the Unicorn is not funny.
That is to say, no particular part of it is funny. Silly, maybe.
And yet as I joined the more than 12 million viewers who have traveled with the surly Brooklyn unicorn and his annoyingly cheerful uni-friends on their Flash-animated adventure, I found myself laughing out loud. It has kind of a cumulative effect that sneaks up on you, battering down the door to your funny bone by dint of sheer, goofy determination.
This clearly is the stuff of cult obsessions.
I had that feeling immediately, and a little research confirmed it.
One year after it was posted on YouTube, Charlie the Unicorn has spawned spoofs, alternate endings, death metal remixes, live-action remakes by squads of teen girls, and one video of a six year old dancing to a cheesy faux song about Candy Mountain – not to mention shirts, coffee cups, beer steins and even dog sweaters.
As web videos go, it is headed for Olympus.
In April it even earned an homage from "Over the Hedge" comic strip creators Michael Fry and T. Lewis.
Charlie's own creator, Jason Steele, has an uncanny knack for randomness, sweetly coupled with the charm of your favorite socially inept 10-year-old cousin.
In addition to YouTube, he now posts high-rez short films and animations at FilmCow.com. They range from live action farces starring Steele and friends running around in Florida, to animated epics about spatulas and spoons battling for world domination.
The answers on his FAQ page offer lots of information about the equipment he uses and almost nothing about the people behind the vids. A production blog for an animated spatula feature, called Spatula Madness, offers a little more insight via regular updates about the day-to-days of production, plus occasional lunch updates and personal details that rival his short films for randomness.
Steele has limited talents and almost no training in art or music, but makes up for all such deficiencies with raw determination. Through painstaking self-editing he merges photographs with crude drawings and refines fumbled note progressions from a digital keyboard to create a viewable and sometimes remarkable level of polish.
The Spatula Madness short film that inspired the upcoming feature length cartoon employs a "rough" style of animation, akin to some of the "bad-on-purpose" offerings of Adult Swim.
So does The Cloak, another of Steel's short cartoons in which a sentient garment creates haphazard destruction while "Fighting against communism with the help of his side-kick, Robert Michum's head." Their primary pass-time appears to be throwing Molotov cocktails out of windows.
Yeah, I know.
It's not funny.
But if you watch long enough you may find yourself laughing.
I laughed.
I can't tell you why, but I did.
That alone is a pretty remarkable achievement.