Every once in a while, YouTube will suggest a strange new video that is so far down my alley it scares me. Its monstrous algorithm aside, as soon as I tapped on the animated short “dead end,” whose thumbnail depicted a bandaged bloody hand, I fell immediately down Victoria Vincent’s penciled-in rabbit hole, or as she named her channel, “Vewn.”
The video opens on a slot machine website. A dreamy-eyed blonde poses on the side of the slots, repeating the asterisked phrase, “The more you spend, the more you win!” The asterisk in the bottom corner of the screen reads, in tiny letters, “EXCLUSIONS APPLY.”
The perpetually losing player is a guidance counselor subjected to the ramblings of a glum, edgy high schooler in all his cliche-glory. The counselor, as dispassionate as the student, is more interested in pulling the lever and hearing the virtual hostess’s flat consolation, “Better luck next time.” Assured by the faint trace of hopelessness in her empty remark, that next time never comes. The counselor sinks deeper into his gambling addiction and alcoholism while the student is left to his own nihilistic musings.
I found this situation intuitive and contemporary: the shared feeling of meaninglessness between a young and a grown man. But it would be foolish to discuss the deep and pressing implications in this video without addressing Vincent’s unique but consistent animation style, characterized by her sharp inexact lines, which contain a bold assortment of colors. This comes off as a crude, informal style as if the characters, objects, and backgrounds were ripped out of a sketchbook and pasted into the frame. She also uses boiling lines for characters and objects, which causes them to perpetually jitter against the still background. It’s a charming and distinct style that allows her to mess with proportions and perspective, exemplified in her distorted buildings and angled doors. It’s also well suited for many of the video’s surreal sequences and macabre twists.
It’s sort of jarring to have such a vibrant style depict such dark subject matters, but Vincent strikes a balance in her shorts through a stunning adherence to realism. This is immediately apparent in the voice acting. At first, I couldn’t explain why, but I found the characters’ voices oddly comforting. The high schooler and counselor had the same monotonous tone that, even in frustration, maintained a sort of tenderness. It reminded me of the first time I watched The Boondocks and expected the usual melodramatics of anime voice-acting but instead got the organics and richness of the voices I recognized in people around me. The tone and diction of Huey, Riley, and Grandad sounded oddly familiar—like those of a friend. Similarly, the narrow modulation and gentleness of Vewn’s voices sound a lot more natural than the wider range most cartoons employ and is a better fit for the gravitas of the subject matter.
Vincent makes another commitment to realism in her depiction of technology, a well-established feature in many of her videos. From gambling sites to simulation devices, she includes details like the exit-, maximize-, and minimize-button on the top corner of windows; accurate file extensions, URL formats, and drop-down menus; and faithful layouts to the popular applications she’s mimicking, such as video streaming services, dating apps, and turn-based RPG’s. No wonder why the opening scene of “dead end” drew me in, the fictional site “SLOT-O-RAMA” seemed just as real as any other scammy gambling site. Thanks to this adherence to detail, it only takes a couple seconds of animation to strike up empathy for the guidance counselor—ensnared in the familiar teeth of addiction.
Combining elements of realism with those of surrealism, she creates tension that propels the viewer through the content while slipping in her own social commentary. This commentary is most obvious in her stunning, hand-drawn backgrounds. The guidance office, for example, has signs like “DON’T LET DEPRESSION TROLL YOU,” or a picture of a beer with the caption “Drink this… if you want to die,” or the smallest but most potent poster, “STEP 1: Graduate / STEP 2: ?????? / STEP 3: Profit.” This collection of posters summarizes the pressing issue presented in the video: obtaining a degree or a job or both won’t guarantee happiness.
I would like to believe that a high school is the ideal institution where an individual can find something beyond the incessant chase of pleasure—but in the short, the institution has failed the student, leaving him hooked on cigarettes and “[hating his] life but [hating] everyone else’s more.” Based on the signs on his walls and his advice, the counselor is in the same pinch as the student—the hamster wheel of spinning cherries and lucky number sevens, eventually halted by a declined credit card. It seems that even though the counselor has a degree, a job, and presumably some sort of shelter, there is still something profoundly tragic about him.
To understand this, we should examine the hedonistic atmosphere in Vewn’s animated worlds. In several landscapes presented in her longest and newest video, “Twins in Paradise,” we see many of the city’s billboards advertising sex. One advertisement I found especially funny depicted a reposed half-naked woman captioned, “NEW, ELUSIVE, SEX.” These advertisements are accompanied by a plethora of liquor stores and pharmacies, reflected by the amount of liquor, pill bottles, and powdery lines Vincent manages to place in the bedrooms of her young characters.
She also sustains this theme through her masterful depictions of digital escapism. In “floatland,” we’re introduced to a girl playing video games in a messy room, filled with game cases, controllers, bottles, pills, and a filled up ashtray. The television though is usually the biggest and most attractive object in the room. On it, an avatar of our character finds herself washed up on the shores of Floatland, a virtual island with friendly NPC’s and frightening enemies such as purple feet and worm armies. As she plays, she levels up her skills in farming, cooking, and combat while developing a romantic relationship with a handsome purple-haired man named Aubury. During this bout of addictive play, she has been ignoring texts from a concerned friend who asks annoying questions like “Have u been outside lately?”
Depicting this young lady in a state similar to the one of the counselor’s, Vincent points out the serious danger of using technology as a means to avoid the “real world.” It’s ironic how what she’s doing in the game (completing slightly varying tasks to level up so that she can have new abilities to do the tasks better—or what gamers refer to as “grinding”) is similar to the life she may be escaping from, the life of what we now call the “essential worker,” people who work to survive, or if they’re slightly better off, to buy stuff that can release them from the stress of work.
I’m sure Vincent doesn’t subscribe to the sensationalized opinion that video games and social media is pure, unadulterated evil. Like any great artist, what she is suggesting is subtle and already (at least partially) understood—that like any addictive substance, video games and social media can create serious social isolation, strengthening the user’s dependency on them.
This issue is brought up quite blatantly in the minute-long video “find true love.” After swiping awhile on his dating app, our character matches with a red-hued lady named, quite uniquely, “star_girl02.” Our character’s Google searches progress as follows: “How to message a girl,” “How to get her to reply,” and finally, “Am i destined for a life of solitude?” Even though this progression is dramatic, it’s relatable and a little cathartic. Everyone (at some point in their lives) has that final google search running in the back of their minds and given that a heavily-liked comment in response says, “You and me both, brother,” I think it’s a fair and common thought for our generation.
Another video titled “kittykat96” centers around a popular YouTuber who goes on a surreal and slightly disturbing journey, where she manifests her internet persona in reality, and it tries to kill her. This sensational story aside, there’s a quick shot where the background is filled with the YouTuber’s video. They include titles like “I haven’t left my house in 3 weeks,” “What to do if you have no friends,” and naturally, “Watch me eat ice cream alone in my room while crying.” Vincent’s (literal) background-commentary presents grotesque versions of reality for comedic effect, and it achieves this effect because, in these exaggerated titles, we see a pernicious truth. On real YouTube, for example, the algorithm picked up a video that now has 4.2 million views titled “21 Years Old: I Have NO Friends.”
But so what? Vewn effectively identifies the pressing issues of meaninglessness, social isolation, and addiction—but what should we do about it? What should the counselor say to the student? What should the concerned friend say to the obsessive gamer? What should the man say to his virtual crush? What videos should the YouTuber actually be posting?
These animations don’t answer these questions. The YouTuber deletes her account, the gamer beats the game and opens the window opposite of the TV, the man closes his laptop after star_girl02 blocks him, and the student puts out his cigarette in the counselor’s coffee, steals his wallet, and skips town.
I can’t tell you what the artist intended, and I don’t place much importance on intention. All we have to work with is the animation itself, and the ending of these shorts are similar in that they all feature a character who, out of frustration, fear, or fatigue, steps out of the cycle of immediate pleasure (the next cigarette, the next level, the next infatuation) and wonders at the possibility of the unknown: an open window, an empty room, or a taxi heading out of town.