My first major ToonBoom project. Based on a weird dream I had, I was very lucky to have it at the time I did, because it was perfect fuel for a school project I had some creative block on where I had to animate two people talking. In the dream, there was this crazy sale going on where everything was free but you essentially had to get in and out and only take a few things because everything in the store, including the air itself was toxic. The animation was inspired by the fact I kept getting in arguments with one of the workers about how toxic I was, I felt kind of horrible when I woke up because I’m typically not combative at all in real life, but I guess toxicity was literally in the air. The worker was also originally a lady in the dream but I was the only voice actor and I couldn’t Bob’s Burgers it in a way that felt up to snuff for me.

I might like to revisit this concept because there was a lot of interesting stuff in the dream. That line about the toothbrushes wasn’t something I added, that came straight from the dream, and hilariously later on I walked past the dental care aisle, no toothbrushes, but all the toothpaste was still there. It was like one of those images from the pandemic where there’d be no beer in the alcohol section except “Corona”, just hilarious environmental storytelling that shows where the masses heads were at during that period people were panic buying. Silly and irrational as it was, it gives the world some humanity.

Another thing is the word “toxic” meant a bit more like what it meant in online discourse, I got chastised by the lady worker for picking up some of my favorite horror films on DVD because “you just like movies where terrible people sneak around and kill women! so toxic…”, which lead to one of our arguments where I then left and didn’t get my number read again. I find it interesting my brain did like some wordplay in my dreams with the literal definition of toxic and the “social” definition as it were to create something almost resembling social commentary on what media people find “problematic” these days. I have a lot of thoughts about that subject matter so it makes sense my brain would come up with that, and I could do so many stupid gags with the idea of real world toxicity being related to things people find “toxic”.

Feel like there’s a lot of fuel there to expand it into a full on short film someday, which I think I’d probably animate in 3D with grease pencil rather than hand drawing every frame. In all honesty, I just didn’t feel like making a 2D rig of my characters. Something that surprised me with this project is I quite like the traditional frame by frame style of 2D animation, at least when it comes to more doodle-y characters like this, much more than I did as a kid when messing around with Pivot where I remember hating it and it turning me off animation for a while until Blender let me rediscover how much I loved it. But there is something very relaxing about just doodling all day while having a podcast on in the background or something. May do more 2D stuff soon for tiny doodly videos like this one.

Another thing I think I learned from this is surrealist horror might be the avenue I go down for personal projects. I don’t gotta follow traditional storytelling rules, I get to be silly but a little fucked up, think with dream logic rather than real world logic, and with the double meaning of “toxic” my brain came up with I realized it’s ripe for me to shove in some angsty social commentary, perfect! So for now this is Toxic Target, but if I ever remake it, we’ll call it Toxic Target Mark I.