Your World is an Illusion
Animated shows that embrace the fact that they're cartoons are among some of the most fascinating to me. It’s like a dissection to see what can be done with what may be the most versatile film and TV medium of them all. This show has embraced that feel a lot with several extreme gags and expressions, and in this cartoon it goes a step forward. It completely breaks down the makeup of the show’s world while also leaving a believable heavy impression on the principal character of the tale.
It all begins after a round of stopping Boxmore robots with K.O. hearing a call for help. The hero in distress is called Holo-Jane, a hologram with mass. It’s through her where K.O. slowly starts getting the idea that he’s living in a world that isn’t even real. Holo-Jane’s problem is that she feels lost in the world, down to pointing out things that don’t feel right from black lines around characters to rocks that are part of the setting.
These are only a few examples to start things out, but under his own power, K.O. starts noticing a lot of things that don’t make sense about his world. Some characters just stand in an awkward pose when they’re not the focus of the scene. When expressing how he and others feel, certain parts of their body are shown while others mysteriously disappear for a few scenes. Nothing changes about the amount of lightning nachos he has in a container no matter how much of them he eats. When walking, he’s actually gliding along the ground. Things like high-fives and punches are represented by single black sheets with a white flash. In other words, K.O. is witnessing a plethora of animation tricks at once revealing the harsh truth that he’s living in a world someone else created. There’s no reality to it all and nothing makes sense.
It’s all a very clever breakdown of a familiar animated world right down to stripping it to its inner workings as a product of animation. However, what really makes it work is how K.O. himself responds to it. While breaking down his world into its basic components is funny in itself, to K.O., he’s lost and afraid knowing he’s in a nonexistent reality making for very genuine internal drama. It soon gets to the point where he hops out of his second dimension into a space of storyboards, character model sheets, and other things necessary to make a cartoon. As the audience remains fascinated in how willing the cartoon is to show what really makes its world, K.O. is still very much lost in this unreality.
It’s only when he finds Holo-Jane again who offers a fresh insight of how even animated worlds can be so engaging. Her monologue basically says that even though this world has things that don’t make sense, the way people interact in the world make it very believable. The way K.O. and the heroes of Lakewood Plaza Turbo go about their lives and form solid healthy friendships with each other make the world feel as real as it needs to. That alone is precisely why animation is such an engaging art form in general. No matter how fanciful and ridiculous the worlds are, the character relationships and how they feel are what keep everything engaging and believable. This holds true for this show as K.O. comes to his senses and gets a comforting hug from his mommy.
At that moment the
cartoon comes full circle as this show at its most engaged in animation as a
medium staged as believably as possible.
It’s an impressive thing from a show that asks if it’s amazing when you
know every second that you see is 24 connected pieces.
A++
Season 2
Rankings
1. Your World is an Illusion
2. Lord Cowboy Darrell
3. My Fair Carol
4. Seasons Change
5. Plaza Film Festival
6. Let’s Watch the Boxmore Show
7. Be a Team
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