Animation doesn’t need 90 minutes, a major studio or a $200 million budget to take you somewhere.
Sometimes all it needs is five minutes and somebody with a really f*cking weird idea.
This round of Cinematic Espresso is all about independent animation shorts — stop motion, puppetry, 2D and 3D animation from creators doing wildly different things with the format. There’s a vaping monster, two very incompatible Velmas, a lonely ghost, one seriously pissed-off Santa and a kid who spends a lifetime trying to reach space.
Basically, exactly the kind of rabbit hole YouTube was made for.
Spare Flesh: Beautifully Deranged Stop-Motion Nightmares
Spare Flesh is probably one of the most bizarre channels you’ll ever stumble across on YouTube.
Founded in Bristol, UK, by Hugo Docking and Henry Blackaller, the independent stop-motion animation and puppetry studio describes its work as a blend of “dark comedy, disturbing body horror and deranged music.”
Yep. That’ll do it.
The studio started in 2021 with a DIY setup and what they describe as a mouldy shed, eventually growing into a larger creative team. And whatever they’re doing in that shed, keep doing it, because their work is wild as f*ck.
It’s colorful, grotesque, funny, disgusting and incredibly detailed. More importantly, you can see how much actual work goes into making these completely ridiculous creatures come alive.
Mr. Vapey Man
Mr. Vapey Man is one of my favorites because holy hell, is this thing fun.
It’s barely over a minute long and manages to turn vaping and addiction into a colorful, sugary little body-horror nightmare. Mr. Vapey Man promises something sweet that feels so nice on your lips, and you don’t need a dissertation to figure out what Spare Flesh is getting at.
It’s gross. It’s creative. It’s making a point. And it’s over before it has time to beat that point into the ground.
Who the f*ck needs microdramas? Give me Mr. Vapey Man.
And then there’s the music, which sounds like something Dr. Demento would have played if he’d had a YouTube channel.
Wait.
Does Dr. Demento have a YouTube channel?
Great. Now I have something else to look up.
To the Brink | The End of the World — A Horror Musical
Another Spare Flesh favorite is To the Brink, a four-minute horror musical about substance abuse featuring an angel, a devil and one very unfortunate guy stuck between them.
Yes. A musical.
Again: Dr. Demento.
The angel and devil sit on the guy’s shoulders while he drinks, the devil screws with his mind, the angel tries to help — maybe — and everything gets progressively more f*cked up as his brain and face start going to hell.
These are puppets, by the way. Very disturbing puppets.
And just when you think you’ve figured out where the thing is going, the angel and devil celebrate by tongue kissing.
It’s revolting.
I loved it.
That’s what Spare Flesh does particularly well. The weirdness isn’t covering for a lack of craftsmanship. Look past the grotesque faces and insanity and these things are extraordinarily well made.
Avocado Animations: What If Someone Actually Followed That Thought?
Avocado Animations describes itself simply as “an avocado that draws.”
Fair enough.
But what I love about the channel is the imagination behind the animation. These are the kinds of ridiculous what if? thoughts that pop into your head and usually disappear five seconds later.
Avocado Animations actually does something with them.
Velma Meets the Original Velma
You should know by now how much I love Scooby-Doo.
You should probably also know there are iterations of Scooby-Doo that I f*cking hate.
Velma, the animated series that premiered in 2023, is definitely one of them. It may even rank higher on my shitlist than Scrappy-Doo, and that’s saying something.
So naturally I was going to watch something called Velma Meets the Original Velma.
It’s such a simple idea: What would happen if the original Velma actually encountered this bastardized version of herself?
But turning that thought into five minutes of animation takes considerably more work than having the thought in the first place.
And Avocado Animations nails the disconnect visually. It doesn’t need somebody standing there explaining everything wrong between these two versions of the character. You can see it.
It’s clever, hilarious and creative as hell. And it gets the point across: leave the OG Scooby-Doo the f*ck alone.
Scooby-Doo plus somebody else’s weird brain?
🔥
Rudolph Gets Fired
Rudolph is my favorite Christmas special of all time.
Stop motion. Cartoon. Book. Doesn’t matter. I’m there.
Bambi is another one of my favorites, although I refuse to watch it anymore because Bambi’s mother gets killed and apparently I’ve decided I don’t need that kind of emotional devastation in my life.
So it’s somewhat surprising that I enjoyed this brutal little one-minute nugget in which Santa finally has enough of Rudolph and fires him in possibly the worst way imaginable.
Rudolph has committed the ultimate sin against Santa.
Santa handles it.
Dramatically.
It’s completely ridiculous, slightly horrifying and enormously entertaining.
But what I really love is the thought behind it. Who thinks of this shit?
Apparently Avocado Animations does.
It’s my favorite kind of creative thinking: take some tiny what if? that makes absolutely no sense and follow it all the way to its nonsensical conclusion.
Caleb Worcester: Under the Thicket
Caleb Worcester is a freelance 3D animator, and there isn’t a huge library of films sitting on his YouTube channel. But Under the Thicket is worth five minutes of your time all by itself.
This one is considerably quieter than the others.
A ghost walks through the woods. That’s basically where we begin.
But the animation is remarkably clean and polished, to the point where I could easily see this becoming a series on a paid streaming or FAST service if Worcester ever wanted to expand the idea.
And this isn’t some wispy spirit we’re talking about. It’s a literal white-sheet ghost.
A sad, lonely white-sheet ghost who eventually encounters an edgy black cat that seems every bit as alone as he is.
There’s something unexpectedly sweet about these two lonely creatures finding each other when neither seems to belong in the world they’re occupying.
At one point, the ghost even bends over a grave to leave flowers, which for some reason sent my brain straight to Darth Vader and Padmé.
Don’t ask. That’s where it went.
And that’s part of the fun of something this conceptual. Worcester isn’t over-explaining what any of it means or telling you exactly what you’re supposed to take from it. There’s enough space to bring your own interpretation.
Mine apparently involves Star Wars.
Your results may vary.
Two Ghosts: Coin Operated
Two Ghosts is the studio of Nicholas Arioli, creator of the award-winning animated short Coin Operated.
And like Worcester, Arioli doesn’t need a channel stuffed with hundreds of films to make an impression.
He needs five minutes.
Remember those coin-operated rides outside grocery stores when you were a kid?
You’d climb aboard convinced you were about to blast into space, gallop into the sunset or embark on some spectacular adventure. Then somebody put a coin in and the damn thing moved back and forth three inches like a broken carnival ride.
Reality was bullshit.
But imagination wasn’t.
Coin Operated captures that perfectly.
The five-minute animated short follows one naive little explorer and his dream of reaching space across roughly 70 years of his life. What begins with childhood wonder becomes something much sweeter: dreams don’t necessarily disappear just because life doesn’t deliver them on schedule.
The kid doesn’t simply give up. He adapts. He works. He keeps trying.
And underneath the clean, colorful animation is something that fits perfectly with the independent creators in Cinematic Espresso.
There is no age limit on trying to make the ridiculous thing in your head real.
This one gave me chills.
The Final Shot
This batch ended up considerably stranger than I expected.
We’ve got a stop-motion vaping nightmare. A drunk being psychologically tortured by an angel and devil who eventually make out. Two Velmas who absolutely should not occupy the same universe. Santa taking Rudolph’s termination extremely seriously. A lonely ghost finding a black cat in the woods. And a little boy refusing to let go of the moon.
They don’t look remotely related. But they are.
Every one of them started with somebody having a weird little thought and deciding it was worth following.
What if?
What if vaping addiction were a grotesque musical monster?
What if the Velma we grew up with met that Velma?
What if Santa fired Rudolph?
What if a sheet ghost were lonely?
What if that stupid grocery-store rocket actually took you somewhere?
That’s the shit I love about independent animation. Nobody had to stretch these ideas into 90-minute movies, build cinematic universes around them or explain every damn thing.
They had an idea.
They made it.
And sometimes five minutes is more than enough.
- ➝ 📺 Watch If You Dare: Don’t just take my word for it. I’ve gathered all the films featured in this edition into our Cinematic Espresso: Weird & Wonderful YouTube Playlist.
- ➝ 📡 Keep Exploring: If these shorts were too fast for you, head over to the YouTube Sidequests Command Center for our deeper dives into digital creator culture.
- ➝ 📇 The Movie Rolodex: Looking for full-length carnage? Search our Movie Rolodex: A–Z Archive to find your next favorite cinematic disaster.
