The Mouth Project

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So, I've always liked mashups. One of my favorite examples in this "genre" is the Mouth series of albums by Neil Cicierega. For a long time I've wanted to make my own music mashups, but music creating/editing programs stress me out and I have historically burned out and gotten frustrated with them very quickly.

Not so for videos, however. Recently I saw this video on YouTube that really touched and inspired me, posted by an animator I enjoy the work of, and it got me thinking...hey, this is like a collage. A video collage. And I can make collages, and videos!

ADHD being what it is, though, I didn't really pursue this train of thought as something that I was going to do...until my girlfriend posted his video. I finally processed that I could make this kind of thing too, and make it my own, stupid way.

All that is to explain the backstory of that I've somehow gotten myself into the project of making a video collage for (hopefully) every song in the Mouth albums.

I plan on using this thread to post the videos that I make, with their "artist statements" attached, since YouTube descriptions don't feel like quite the right place to put those. I've made a few already, so I'll write about those first, then any more that I make after, hopefully until I finish the project, but who knows how long (and how many focus shifts) that will take.

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The order I make these is not the order they are in the albums, for the most part, because trying to do that would probably burn me out instantly. I just make whatever I find the most inspiration or motivation for in the moment. That said, my first video is track 14 of the first album, Melt Everyone.

I would recommend watching the videos before reading their artist statements, so I'll put the statement below in spoiler tags. I also try to keep these videos fairly tame, enough that I can post them comfortably without in-video trigger warnings, but I'll give any major possible warnings in advance in this thread.

For example, this video is centered around melting objects: primarily toys, but some chocolate bunnies too. Some of the toys catch on fire at points. The scene transitions do not flash very rapidly, but they are a quick flash to black and then the next clip.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

At first glance, this video is not particularly deep. I mean, it's called "melt everyone." Everyone is melting. That's pretty self-explanatory. And a lot of this video was based off that rather funny idea! However, this video was also made during a really rough heat wave in my area, one that was happening right at the end of August, where every day had a little "higher than historic record high" note on it in my phone's weather app. As of me writing this, it's nearing the end of September, and I'm still being given the "higher than record high" notices, wearing shorts and having to run the A/C in the Midwest USA just before the autumn equinox. That's not right. Everyone is melting, and that includes the cute little clumps of processed oil that we call toys and candy.

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The next one is significantly longer, enough that I wanted to explore two separate-but-related ideas in a single video. My first videos are actually all clustered around the same area, near the end of Mouth Sounds and the beginning of Mouth Silence. Not sure why, but it's interesting. This one is for track 16 of Mouth Sounds, Mullet With Butterfly Wings.

This video involves animals handled humanely but sometimes roughly in uncomfortable situations, in small cages, and in settings that are intended for testing on animals. Nothing graphic is shown, but there is a minor amount of blood at the beginning (a vampire bat is drinking it out of a dish) and there is a rabbit shown that is acting strangely as a result of a test (the test is not shown).

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

So, the obvious takeaway from this may at first be that I am against animal testing. But then, what does the other theme in the video imply? Am I equating laboratory testing and animal showing? The answer, in a subjective personal artist intention way, is that I am not equating anything. I'm presenting the scenes and letting their juxtaposition provoke the viewer's own thought.

As a result of wanting to present a view of animal testing that was not overt shock footage, I ended up using a lot of pro-animal-testing videos. This does not necessarily mean that I "believe" these are the conditions all lab animals are in, but it is interesting to me how we get sanitized looks at both the testing and show sides of animal husbandry: it's just that the testing is more known to be harmful when it's harmful. I don't think either are inherently "evil," but both have serious potential for suffering that needs to be carefully weighed versus the benefit to humanity.

Speaking of humanity, all the animals in this video are very closely tied to humanity by three main strings I have identified: Usefulness, Love, and Spectacle. A lab mouse is not particularly loved, nor is it made into much of a spectacle, but it is considered very useful. A pet dog may be loved, and training it to enter in a competition makes it into a spectacle, and if it wins, it may be useful. A working dog at a trial is useful, but being presented as a spectacle. I could detail this for every animal in the video, but that would take some of the fun out of it, I think.

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Okay, well, I accidentally lied about my videos all being clustered in one area. This one is the only one so far I've made based off a song from Mouth Moods, which is probably my favorite of the series, but I struggle to come up with video ideas for, for a variety of reasons. This is track 2 of Mouth Moods, titled Floor Corn.

This video has a lot of blood and (animal) violence in it. As described by my friend Andy, "exploding ketchup packets" would be the most fitting term for the characters shown in the video. The blood is only animated, and not detailed at all. The real-life portions of the footage have no blood.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

When I was a kid, I spent most of my online time on a website called Scratch. Originally a place for sharing things made with a simple kids' programming language, it quickly became a child social network, and fostered many a child fandom. I was one of the many children who read the Warriors book series and posted about it on Scratch. I didn't want to bother digging through the site itself to find the actual Warriors animations I watched as a child, so I pulled what seemed like appropriately iconic and violent ones from YouTube to stand as symbols. (My secret is I never watched any of these as a kid. The only YouTube Warriors content I liked were sad Bluestar animations and tributes to Fireheart and Graystripe's "friendship.")

As for the song itself, it's also connected to Scratch for me. Popcorn (one of the songs used in this mashup) was one of my absolute favorite songs as a kid, entirely because I heard it in a Scratch project once. Despite this video not using any Scratch footage, it's a sort of tribute to my time on the site in 2009.

Why the real life footage, you ask? Well one, for variety. And two...just look at them. This is what I imagined while reading, personally, not so much the anime cat battles. But I have genuine great respect for the kids who put their whole heart into animating Tigerstar exploding in a shower of red, and I salute them with this video.

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Now it's back to Mouth Sounds, with track 12, No Credit Card. I immediately knew what I wanted to do with this one.

This video has some bright flashing lights throughout, mainly in the very beginning (as soon as you press play). Sorry, it was the 80s.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

So...this is a weird one. I got into Transformers in 2016, right at the height of my robot obsession in my teen years. I had tentatively poked at Transformers media before, but in 2016, I read all of the More than Meets the Eye IDW comic, and it did something terrible to my brain. It's still very special to me, but that's its own story. Anyway, there's a point in the comic where some of the characters have a movie night, and they watch Back to the Future. The song remixed in this video's song features within the comic, and I grew very attached to it, even beyond its original context. So of course I wanted to feature Transformers in this video. Plus, G1 has plenty of bizarre love plots!

Something else about this song, though, is its strangely sinister atmosphere. The repetition of the "no credit card" line that lends the title to the remix always struck me as odd, and I thought it worked perfectly for Transformers, which has always been a glorified toy commercial, in all of its forms. It really came together at the end when I decided to include footage of someone's giant toy collection, which they may or may not have used a credit card to pay for.

Disclaimer: I have no opinion on the person shown in the video. It was just the biggest Transformers collection I could find a good video of quickly on YouTube. Sorry, random guy, for using you as a metaphor for consumerism, but maybe you deserved it, because holy shit this guy has a room like this for just about every 80s Boy toy line.

Oh yeah, did you know there was a Back to the Future TV cartoon, by the way? I didn't until I made this video and saw the random dog character they added has a train for some reason.

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Here's the 17th and final track from Mouth Sounds, titled Smooth Flow. Mouth Sounds has always been one of the harder ones for me to listen to on its own, but it lends itself to videos very well.

This video has some blood, but only in the context of chum in the water in a single non-graphic clip.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

Okay, this one is mostly a joke. It's not all  a joke, but mostly a joke. And isn't humor art? This video is primarily dedicated to the legendary Smooth Sharks comic and ensuing Twitter replies. It's one of my favorite stupid internet jokes ever, and I don't usually go for the "repeating a falsehood while making fun of people who try to fight with you" jokes much.

Aside from that, there's a personal touch in that Enya was the artist played for my nap times as a very young child, according to my parents. I find this song very soothing, actually. To pay tribute to that, along with real shark videos and the iconic Jaws, I included some shark media from my childhood, like Finding Nemo and the often-forgotten Discovery Kids show, Kenny the Shark. The big one featured here, though, is Shark Tale, as it's a part of my childhood of course but also a Dreamworks film, and just so happens to exist on a combo GBA cartridge with the movie Shrek. I was ecstatic at this find, as it perfectly tied in to the All Star ending of the song and album.

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Artist Statement:

Spoiler

Okay, this one is mostly a joke. It's not all  a joke, but mostly a joke. And isn't humor art? This video is primarily dedicated to the legendary Smooth Sharks comic and ensuing Twitter replies. It's one of my favorite stupid internet jokes ever, and I don't usually go for the "repeating a falsehood while making fun of people who try to fight with you" jokes much.

Aside from that, there's a personal touch in that Enya was the artist played for my nap times as a very young child, according to my parents. I find this song very soothing, actually. To pay tribute to that, along with real shark videos and the iconic Jaws, I included some shark media from my childhood, like Finding Nemo and the often-forgotten Discovery Kids show, Kenny the Shark. The big one featured here, though, is Shark Tale, as it's a part of my childhood of course but also a Dreamworks film, and just so happens to exist on a combo GBA cartridge with the movie Shrek. I was ecstatic at this find, as it perfectly tied in to the All Star ending of the song and album.

As one of the only people in the world who enjoyed Shark Tale, thank you.

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You are so welcome. I was incredibly neutral on it as a kid, but it was one of my baby cousin's favorite movies, which he would ask to watch before he could even speak simply by saying "RAAAR" (which was different than his request for Monsters Inc., which was "RAAWWRRRRR"). I watched it pretty often, but I probably have more affection for it than your average person who watched Shark Tale repeatedly at the request of a relative, so that's something, for sure.

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This one is a bit shorter and simpler than some of my other videos, but I had a very specific vision for it. It's for the first song on Mouth Silence, a truly legendary album that while making these videos, I think is my new favorite of the series. Sorry Moods, I think I just listened to it too many times as a teenager.

Anyway. There is some blood in this one, and some character's heads disappearing with skulls behind them, but it's not violent, and also it's some really ridiculous creepypasta bullshit, so it's not as scary as it sounds.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

This video is actually based on Will's OC Weatherman, a character that I love very much. He's really sad and lives in a TV. The main repeated clip in this video is from a fake creepypasta video about the kid's channel Qubo shutting down, and it became a major injoke related to Weatherman thanks to The Lounge. I really wanted to take the silly video, and take it and the feelings of the character we relate it to seriously, and made something that's relatively slow-paced and sad.

Everything changes. It's important to be aware of the danger of nostalgia, especially when using it for art. This series uses a lot of my own nostalgia, but I don't want it to be a mindless "hey, remember when things were better?" trip. There's good and bad in both old and new.

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Enough being sad. Let's be horny. The song for this one is actually the second track on Mouth Silence, titled Rollercloser.

The only thing I could really think to warn for in this one is some mild cartoon "body horror."

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

Oh boy, this one. Okay, so, I associate this song with Will. He associates it with himself. It's wacky and weird and incredibly sexual. So what better to combine all of those things with than the concept of Tumblr Sexymen? Just in case you don't know, a "sexyman" is a character that's widely considered attractive by a sizeable base of what is often female fans of a media. I won't get into the "true" definition of this term, but that's a vague idea of it. My wonderful girlfriend Will of Eggware fame happens to relate to a lot of these "sexyman" types of characters. In fact, all the characters I featured in this are ones I associate with him.

I didn't really want to make any kind of deep social commentary with this one, because frankly, I'm tired of seeing deep social commentary arguments on characters that I like. I just wanted to appreciate them. This one was for me to enjoy, and to curse my girlfriend with the burden of being known and loved.

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Here's one for track 15 of Mouth Sounds, a sort of gap to fill in this weird little cluster of songs I'm doing first for whatever reason. This was another one that I knew what I wanted from the start, but it took a little tweaking, especially since the song is so short.

This video has some scenes that might count as flashing quickly, but nothing full-screen. There are also sharp implements and fire, but it's not violent.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

I knew from the start that I wanted this one to be full of How It's Made type videos of objects being manufactured. It was actually pretty hard to get the timing right, so it's a little sloppier than I would prefer, but I wanted to finish it rather than spend forever on the timing and rhythm. If I really want to, I can remake it later. I'm trying to just make what I make with these, and keep moving forward with them, as a sort of challenge to my own OCD.

I wanted a little variety besides just playing clips from How It's Made, so I thought about other shows I enjoyed in this genre as a child. Unwrapped was of course the next pick, but then I realized a show with a strange industrial aesthetic would fit too: The Most Extreme. A show on Animal Planet that covered animals with abilities that far surpass humans' corresponding abilities, it's well known online as a meme for its surreal CGI segments of humans doing weird things and in weird shapes. It was a favorite of mine at about the same time period as How It's Made and Unwrapped, and it added the perfect little bizarre flavor that made it more personal than just some machinery.

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Here's the last one in my backlog of videos I made before I made this thread, set to track 3 of Mouth Silence, and it's about furries.

I really can't think of any common warnings for this one, except there are two very short clips of a well-known horror game with a robot fox character, used for comedic effect and not horror.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

So, I'm a furry. I have a very complicated relationship with the furry fandom, especially things that are popular within the furry fandom. However, it's still been a major part of my life for at least a decade now, and I wanted to pay tribute to the weird group of (largely non-straight and non-neurotypical) people on the internet that share some vague common art interests that I happen to be part of.

I didn't want to have the cruel edge that a lot of furry-focused comedy on the internet seems to have. A lot of people know furries exist now, and a lot of people hate them. I think there's room to poke fun at furry culture without being mean for no reason. As silly as my videos come across, they're all genuine in some way. I really do respect the art of appreciating an anthropomorphic fox woman. I mean, just look at my girlfriend. Sometimes he's an anthropomorphic fox woman, and I certainly appreciate him.

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An actually new video, wow! This one is also from Mouth Silence, as the 8th track on the album. Sometimes I rely on Discord polls to tell me what I should work on next, and this one won my last one, so that's what I did. Thank you, Art Haters.

This video contains some footage of police/military style "K9" training, which involves a dog being encouraged to act violently, and a human threatening and sometimes hitting the dog.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

This one is kind of hard to explain without noting that I am a multiple system, and have alters/system members. Anyone who didn't know that already probably doesn't know me personally, so I'll leave the explanation at that. This video was created in cooperation with Cobalt, one of my system members, who happens to relate to dogs, in particular German shepherds. This is a breed of dog often known for their association with police, and a lot of fictional depictions you'll find of them glorify police in some way. I am strongly against dogs being trained for use in intimidating and hurting the marginalized people that police harm every day, especially since those dogs are not treated well in the process.

As part of his relating to these dogs, Cobalt uses their symbolic struggle to connect to his own experiences. However, I didn't want to have a video that was just extended cuts of dogs being trained to hurt others, because that's not fun to watch, and also because things are not just one thing. German shepherds are also trained as service dogs and kept as beloved family pets. There's stress and struggle involved in all of these things, even those that are not inherently abusive.

This is also a song that has pretty clear lyrics, and I tried to match cuts to lyrics as much as possible. Some take the lyric more literally than others. One that I want to point out specifically is the "create another fable" lines, which I used to show situations that weren't so bad, turning the words into more of a metaphor for escapism than just describing a flat-out lie.

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This is a special one, made to commemorate the end of the Summer of Dinosaurs (a series of movie nights in the Eggware Discord). It is, of course, set to Dear Dinosaur, track 6 of Mouth Moods.

This video contains some non-graphic dinosaur violence, and apocalyptic visuals related to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

On the surface, this is just a silly reminiscence about a bunch of dinosaur media we watched over the past couple months. And that is what it is, to some extent. I used only clips from stuff we watched in the Discord server, and I tried to use everything we watched, but unfortunately I forgot about a cool old stop-motion documentary that was one of the first things we watched. I could have maybe cut out some of the Alpha And Omega footage to put it in, but I'd already rendered the video and shared it, so oh well.

On a deeper level, this video is reflective of my long-time interest in dinosaurs, especially in their extinction. Have you ever noticed that dinosaur stories are always about grief? It's hard to find a dinosaur story that doesn't at least acknowledge that they don't exist anymore, and often they are defined by their inevitable end. Not a lot focuses on how we do still have dinosaurs around today, in the form of what we call birds. The ending of the original Walking With Dinosaurs series used clips of real-life birds, and that was something I really appreciated (and used in this video).

Also, did you know the song Walk The Dinosaur is about nuclear war? I learned that while making this, and it made it even more poignant for me.

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Man, this one was a tough one. It was the next voted on by Discord, and I had a good idea for it, but it proved to be considerably more effort than I thought it would be, especially for a song about piss. Yeah, this is Piss, the final track of Mouth Silence.

This video has some minor flashing at the beginning thanks to some rendering weirdness, and some fast sped-up clips. Some toys get thrown off a roof. Also, there's pregnant toys, toys that piss, toys that cry, and toys with snot, I guess? It's all cartoony and stuff that aired on TV, but I figured I'd warn for it anyway.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

Originally, my only idea for this one was "those weird baby dolls that drink and pee." They always seemed to be a fixture on TV commercials targeted at girls, and they were never something I wanted for myself, but they were always around. While putting together the video, I quickly realized that there was a lot more in the song than there were clips of weird baby dolls on YouTube. Plus, I like these to be fun to watch, and I would not want to watch 5 minutes of just that.

As I was putting this together, it started to become something way more than I was expecting. Yet again, a stupid joke video has become an ominous warning about the dangers of nostalgia. Two of the Barbie commercials I used were toys that had controversial gimmicks - pregnant Midge, and Growing Up Skipper. I found it interesting that both were about "growing up," in a way, and I decided to run with that. All these weird baby dolls mimic "growing up" by way of making the child playing with them act as a mother, after all. And that's not inherently good or bad, it's just what you make of it. So is all of childhood and growing up. As I was gathering sources for this video, I kept finding people in the comments talking about how life was just better when a certain commercial was airing. The lyrics in the song, when not talking about piss, talk about wanting something else out of life. Then I realized, since this was the last song on the album, it matched with Goodbye, which I had already made a video for. Instead of analog sign-offs, I decided to make the final moments of the video channel switch-overs, particularly two I remember. I reversed the Adult Swim clip, as a sort of acknowledgement of the video itself finally admitting to growing up.

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I promise I didn't forget about this thread, I just have ADHD and a full-time job, and making new videos was more fun than writing about them, so I have a bit of a backlog to share here again.

This one is for Close to the Sun, track 15 on Mouth Silence. Kind of a random pick, but I had a really specific idea for it and the song was short, which I really needed after almost burning myself out trying to bring Piss together. What a sentence.

This video doesn't have any major warnings, unless you have scopophobia, I guess, because there's an extended close-up on (non-realistic) eyes.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

It's kind of hard to explain where the idea came from, because this is one of those that kind of just appeared fully formed in my head. I was thinking about birds, and getting close to birds, and how they scatter when you run at them. And I thought about how that's a thing in video games, these little incidental birds that you can never really get close to, because they're not meant to be looked closely at. That also got me thinking about video game distance models in general, and things in games that you're never meant to see close-up, but how there's a whole community around trying to see them.

Shoutout to Shesez and Boundary Break, by the way. Those videos were a major inspiration for this one, and I used a lot of footage from them in this.

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This is one that was voted on by the IHA Discord, and I had an initial concept for it very clear in my mind, but it took a while to compile sources, especially since I try to limit sources for these videos to things I am at least tangentially familiar with for the most part. It's track 6 of Mouth Silence, simply titled Pokémon.

This video has some very brief clips showing realistic, but not real, guns.

Artist Statment:

Spoiler

Hopefully you've watched the video already, because here's the main gimmick: there are no Pokemon in this video. The song itself is a tribute to the effect of Pokemon on society, and what people thought of it. So what better to do with that than make a video showing how Pokemon affected my own life?

I actually didn't get into Pokémon until I was about 12, and that was at the very end of the DS era of games. For most of my childhood, Pokémon was just kind of a background influence informing more than I could even comprehend. To this day, people are using the inspiration and ideas imparted on them by Pokémon to make their own media, in varying degrees of sincerity.

There's also a strange religious component to the world's reaction to Pokémon. In fact, the big reason I wasn't into Pokémon when I was younger was because of the religion I was raised in. The one clip used in this video that I had no knowledge of prior to making the video is that of a Christian trading card game that was advertised on Kickstarter as a Christian alternative to Pokémon. I didn't look too much into it, since all I really needed was the trailer for footage, but just the concept I felt was so emblematic of my constant childhood battle to find something like Pokémon that wasn't considered demonic. Fun fact: the clip near the beginning with the little purple thing turning into a knockoff Lugia is from Johnny Test, an incredibly mediocre cartoon that had a Pokémon parody episode that I watched repeatedly as a child in a desperate attempt to be part of the Pokémon craze that was still sweeping elementary schools well into the 2000s.

This statement is already pretty long, but I do also want to note that pretty much the entire Digimon season 1 opening is in there because the timing happened to work really well, but also because once my parents finally decided to give in and let my sibling and I enter the world of the demonic, my younger sibling got REALLY into Digimon. I didn't watch it much, but it was playing around the house pretty much constantly for a couple years.

Oh, and one more thing: the final clip of the video is someone scrolling through all the pet battle achievements in World of Warcraft. I tried to get those, once. All I can say is it tested even my tolerance for monotony.

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This one was also voted on by the IHA Discord! They really had no idea what they were in for with this. All the information I provided was a bowl emoji on a poll with the track title, Best. It's track 5 on Mouth Silence, contributing to the weird clump of songs I decided to focus on first for whatever reason.

This video doesn't have overly bright/rapid full-screen flashing, but has some clips that might be a little tough on the eyes if you're sensitive to fast-moving or flashing video, especially the segment around 2:15.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

I'll be honest, the initial gimmick of this video was just because of the "best part of waking up" line, but it started to become more and more relevant the more I put into it.

Cereal mascots are a fascinating sub-genre of advertising. They exist solely to promote incredibly unhealthy clumps of sugar to children and their parents, but the competition is fierce and varied. Something I noticed is that there's a few different types of cereal mascot - the main ones being the "hero" who children can trust to provide them with a tasty cereal and exciting life, and the "victim" who acts as a strange "lesser" to the children being advertised to, letting the kids feel superior by keeping the mascot from eating its own cereal. The song itself is goofy and wacky-sounding while exploring themes of temptation and superiority...just like cereal mascots. Huh.

The secondary theme in this video, which was going to be more of a major point before I got overwhelmed by cereal commercials, is the spectacle of televised competitions. Both sweepstakes and game shows are about the same level of random chance in the end, and there's something addictive about watching them, thinking that could be you. They feel a lot like commercials in their own way.

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The Mouth albums have a bunch of random super-short jokes interspersed with the actual songs, and that seems like it should be easy to work with, but it takes just as much consideration to make a joke work in 10 seconds as it does in 4 minutes. I was inspired when I'll Be There For You by The Rembrandts came on in Dairy Queen of all places, though, so I decided to go for it. This is Friends, track 4 of Mouth Silence.

I don't know how to warn for triggers in a 10-second clip, so just take the thumbnail as a warning if it means anything to you.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

I actually had a video saved of the Discovery Kids changeover to The Hub that I planned on using in Piss, but ended up not having room for. For being a 10-second joke, this video is weirdly personal to me. I was a big fan of Discovery Kids before The Hub, and mourned the changeover, especially since all the old shows were gone to make room for toy commercials.

I watched the initial premiere of MLP:FiM with my sibling in 2010, though, and I knew it was the start of a new era. A really, really strange one.

I choose not to explain the Starscream clip beyond that Transformers Prime, also on The Hub and premiering in 2010, was also part of a weird era for me. Indeed, no one told me life was gonna be that way.

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This is another one I had to spend some time finding sources for, since I really only had a central concept that I kept reworking in my head. Thanks to a few perfect coincidences, though, I think this came together just the way I wanted it to in the end. Behold track 7 of Mouth Silence, titled Sexual Lion King.

This video has some very minor cartoon animal death at the beginning.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

Something I've been trying to do in these videos is to minimize or completely omit videos that are directly used in the actual song. Hence, no The Lion King in this video. I felt like it would be too easy. Amazingly, when looking for clips for this video, I happened to find that there was a perfect The Lion King parody in Pinky and the Brain, which provided the exact bookends I wanted.

Anyway, we all know the Heterosexual Cartoon Animal Couple. They're everywhere. They're unavoidable. That's how animals work in real life, right...? Well, if you're here, you probably know that's not right. Gender and sexuality are not static, nor are they binaries, no matter what species you are. Cartoons are a way to explore that, and cartoon animals are even more abstractified. The obligatory heterosexual cartoon animal couple has always both grated on me and captivated me. They put on such a performance of their own genders, their own roles. The designated female animals sporting exaggerated decorations and eyelashes are their own sort of drag to me. And as a lesbian with a weird relationship to gender, I understood these cartoon animals as something more than a man and a woman doing what men and women are expected to do. That's right, folks. I'm saying Lady and the Tramp, Spirit and Rain, Stitch and Angel, Donkey and Dragon, they're all lesbians to me. That's my truth and I'm living it.

Then there's the more obvious non-straight clips. There's the legendary Arthur wedding between Mr. Ratburn and his husband, of course, and Pinky and the Brain are one of those classic "ambiguously gay duos" of cartoon animals, but I also included Snagglepuss, a character who isn't necessarily stated to be gay, but certainly was a role model for plenty of people who saw themselves in him. The clip I found of him slicing up a sausage isn't exactly...subtle...the way I used it, but I thought it was too funny to leave out, especially amongst all the clips of cartoon animals in drag (which I owe tremendous thanks to a single YouTube account for compiling). There's also the clearly-intended-to-be-gay-for-jokes characters from Ice Age, who I placed alongside the clearly-intended-to-be-NOT-gay-for-jokes main characters from Ice age. I could go on about the bizarre heterosexuality of the Ice Age franchise, but this is already my longest artist statement yet, so I'll save it.

I initially planned on having more video footage of real life gay animals, but I wanted this video to focus more on romance than just humpin', so I ended up narrowing it down to two examples I felt exemplified what I was going for the best: a lioness that spontaneously developed a mane and took on normally male lion behaviors, and a pair of albatrosses in a long-term same-sex relationship. There are way more examples in nature of animals not following strict binaries, but those require either more context to understand or are the aforementioned humpin'.

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Another super short one, this was mainly made to fit in the empty spot in the cluster of songs I have finished, so it can be watched as one continuous thing. This is Bega Interlude, track 13 of Mouth Sounds.

This video involves sped up footage layered with transparency, so it's pretty flashy. Caution recommended for photosensitive viewers.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

There's really not much going on in this song aside from that it's a muffled clip of a midi version of Mambo No. 5, so I did what I could. The obvious joke here is the classic "a little bit of Monika" meme from when Doki Doki Literature Club first released, but the other two videos I included are parodies of dating games themselves, making up a sort of collection of girls, much like the original song.

Fun fact: the videos fade in for exactly five seconds, then fade out for 5 seconds, and the top two layers are each at 55% percent opacity.

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Oh hey...it's been a while since I've posted in here. It's actually been a while since I've made any new videos, but there was a backlog of statements I hadn't finished either! As I attempt to get myself to pick this project back up, I'll try to finish that backlog, and hopefully remember what I was thinking when I made these.

First up, this one is for Orgonon Gurlz, Track 11 of Mouth Silence. I actually didn't like this song as much when I originally listened to this album, but it's really grown on me, especially since making this video.

This video has a lot of layered semi-transparent clips, has adjusted contrast to make it extra bright, and has some flashing lights in the way that 80s cartoons tend to have.

Artist statement:

Spoiler

Being raised as a girl, I was exposed to plenty of girls' media as a kid. There is overall a much lower standard for Girl Media than there is for works that are made to appeal to more neutral or masculine audiences, and I really wanted to focus on appreciating the really girly stuff that often goes overlooked when people talk about "good" girls' cartoons, which tend to skew toward more action-focused, "boys can watch too"-type media.

This song combines two very different eras of women in music, and that's something I wanted to focus on, too. My mom grew up as a girl too, of course, and she has her own era of girly media to reminisce on. Some of those things even had equivalents or reboots in the 2000s, connecting us further. Our relationship may have its issues, but as I get older and am able to comprehend her more as a person rather than a vague authority figure, I realize we have a lot more in common than I ever thought we did.

A sort of side thing I really want to point out in this one is the MLP:FiM clip used in this video. If you weren't there in 2011, you probably have no idea why it seems so strangely fitting with the song. No, I didn't make a separate AMV just to put in the background of the beginning of this song, and no, I didn't take a fanmade one. That there is an official AMV complete with an official parody of California Gurls recorded in Pinkie Pie's voice, and it aired on The Hub. I listened to it more than I did the original Katy Perry song. I am not proud of it, but I was 12 years old, so I'm not really ashamed either.