"Little Runmo" and "The Amazing Digital Circus"

This review was comissioned by @skaianDestiny.


An independent animator named Gooseworx had her big break when her pitch for "The Amazing Digital Circus" got picked up by Glitch Productions. The 2023 pilot has, in a scant year and change, beaten "Hazbin Hotel" for most-watched animated pilot on YouTube.

Along with that pilot, I'll be looking at a shorter, one-off piece of animation that Gooseworx created a couple years earlier, "Little Runmo," and looking at the common (and evolving) themes and visual styles. There's a very clear throughline between the two. A vibe that I've decided to dub "Nintendo Gnostic."

I'm not sure if it actually needs a name, since afaik it's just the one person doing it. But I'll call it that anyway, because it's silly and also accurate.

It also occurred to me that there's a lot of alienation-from-own-body stuff in both of them that feels like transgender anxiety. I don't know if Gooseworx ever said that this was her intent, but considering that I had this thought before I found what that she is trans herself, well, I doubt it's a coincidence. Hardly the first time that trans artists have drawn on gnostic mythos to talk about their own dysphoria and alienation.


The 2019 short Little Runmo feels like a love letter to the old two thousands era "lolrandom" flash animations. And also a commentary on the trajectory of platformer games from origins to present. I think? I think.

We open on the titular protagonist struggling with the first few obstacles of Super Runmo World, and quickly running out of lives.

The mook enemies look like slightly more grotesque versions of the classic koopa, but Runmo's lives, his 1UP tokens, look like little levitating icons of his head. This will be important later.

After failing repeatedly to cross a pit with an extra life on the other side, Runmo consults friendly hint-giver "Pikit." At first, Pikit just gives unhelpful "no shit" game manual advice, but when pressed he offers a piece of genuine insight.

Runmo is immune to fall damage, in normal circumstances. Which means that...yeah, it's weird. Why DOES falling in pits kill him, if falling normally doesn't? What's down there, exactly?

...

You know, I remember playing the original Halo as a teen and being bemused by that specific point during long falls where the game decides Master Chief won't be able to survive after this point and just takes all his health away, complete with the bright flash of his shields collapsing, sometimes long before he hits bottom. It's not just old school platformers where this developer shortcut can take you out of the game a little.

Speaking of "out of the game" now...

...

Runmo climbs, cautiously, down the side of the pit. Just below the bottom of the "screen," he finds that there is a device purposefully set up there that extracts lives from entities like himself. He manages to bypass the life-extractor, and then we're in Oddworld.

The green-skinned, red-eyed humanoid with a sad face probably should have had me expecting this. He *looked* like a Mario-ified Abe from the beginning, it just becomes a lot more obvious when you put him in a grungy industrial setting like this one.

Anyway, the pits (and possibly other sources) are supplying the machinery with an enormous supply of lives. Which are in turn being pulped into a green slime and fed to an aristocratic worm-alligator-monster thing who isn't happy to see an intruder. Things get increasingly surreal and violent from there. Death proves to be Runmo's escape, as he respawns back at the level start (now on his last remaining life), but when he opts to return to the underworld and make another attempt at stealing back lives, well...we move on from Oddworld and enter Little Nightmares territory.

Stopping the machines, unfortunately, doesn't make the lives easier to get ahold of (and he has to flee a terrifying meatball-man to even get that far). All it does is cause the consumer at the end to waste away and die in mere minutes, without Runmo himself getting anything out of it. It's only after being swallowed whole by the monster's "temp" replacement and accidentally killing it from the inside using a wheel of fortune (like I said, it gets surreal) that he gets anywhere. A grim reaper-like figure who seems to control this underworld places the corpses in a mausoleum of sorts, where - upon exiting the temp's dead body - Runmo finds the dessicated remains of a creature similar to himself by the name of Jumpmo.

Fearing mortality more than ever after his horrifying experiences, and seeing how much the corpse's head resembles a 1UP, Runmo rips it off and absorbs it.

This SEEMS to work, at first. But then Runmo's life counter glitches out into eldritch wingdings, the ground shakes, and Runmo finds himself facing the Gates of Truth to receive Yog-Sothoth's judgement.

The Outer God proceeds to punish Runmo's transgression by...destroying a whole bunch of random shit that notably does not include Runmo. While babbling incoherent koans about the meaning and value of life. Fortunately, gods prove less impressive than they're cracked up to be, and Yog crashes into one of the spike hazards that Runmo had been struggling with back at the beginning. He dies. Runmo is deposited back on the ground where he started.

Seemingly having learned a lesson or something, Runmo risks his final life to cross the spike-and-pit obstacle the way he was supposed to. And succeeds! He gets the 1UP on the far side! Unfortunately, the entire level after that point is a broken black void left by Yog's rampage, and trying to advance further just sees Runmo floating away into nothingness and exploding into a cloud of wasted life force.

The ending, I assume, is a play on the "secret worlds" that you can get to by maneuvering your character through a glitched wall in some old games. Even if you manage to glitch yourself back into the game world again after doing so, everything is now likely to be glitched and buggy until you reload.


While one certainly sympathizes with little Runmo's plight, and chafes at the hypocrisy of the worm-king-dude getting to eat hundreds of mulched lives while Runmo stealing one little head is apparently a cosmic violation, on further thought he becomes a much darker figure. Like, why did he want to cross that spike/pit barrier so much in the first place? Obviously, in a Mario-like you just don't have the option of going left, but the usual game boundaries don't seem to apply in Runmo's world. So, why? Did he just want the 1Up? Were the three lives he started with - much more than most people ever get - really not enough for him? Were all the deaths he caused in his struggle for one more life, even before Yog got involved, really worth it?

Granted, Runmo wasn't ever the aggressor per se. But still. These conflicts were all easily avoidable for him.


The Amazing Digital Circus is a more mature and less ironic foray into similar thematic (and aesthetic) territory. This time, the "Nintendo" part of Nintendo Gnostic is of the Mario64 flavor. The "Gnostic" part, meanwhile, is a much more explicit presence from the beginning of the pilot onward.

In an obnoxiously bright and loud N64-looking virtual world, an entity named Cane who manifests as a pair of toy dentures with a body attached rules the "digital circus" troupe with bubbly, affectionate tyranny.

Their (apparently customary) song and dance routine is interrupted when a new character appears in their midst. She's a little rubber clown-doll thing. Until literally a second ago, however, she was a human on Earth. She put on a strange headset, and now she's here, in this form.

A form that she tears at in anguish, trying to get it "off" of her, as it isn't her body, hell it isn't even human. She nearly goes into nervous shock. The other clown-creatures of the digital circus mostly just wait for her to calm down. Some of them make a token effort at comforting her. Others are brutally sarcastic, in a way that seems...distinctly unhealthy. Still others are unable to speak at all, reacting in terror to her presence. They calm down a bit when it becomes clear that the newcomer is human, and not "another of Cane's NPC's."

When she overcomes her own shock by convincing herself that it's fine, it's okay, this must just be a lucid dream (a belief that one of the others darkly implies they've all gone through before being brutally disabused of) he tries to introduce herself...only to discover that she can't remember her name. Or any concrete details about her identity. She starts freaking out again, and this time when she tries to swear a visual and auditory censor effect cuts her off; the amazing digital circus is appropriate for all ages, and this type of language will not be permitted.

Her mind, body, and speech are all mangled. She misses a life and family that she isn't allowed to remember, but knows that she has. Cane just assures her that she'll love it here. Everyone loves it here. Everyone loves the amazing digital circus. All around them, the other once-human clowns cry or laugh or glower. It's impossible to know how long its been in realtime, but some of them are sure they've been here for years.

...

According to Gooseworx, this series was primarily inspired by "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream."

...

The newcomer, who is given the name of Pomni for now, isn't willing to give up hope just yet. Which is normal. However, she's warned that she should give up hope *eventually,* because otherwise something terrible might happen. Speaking of which, one of the other circus residents - the restless Kaughmo - has gone missing recently, and some of them are starting to fear the worst.

Pomni was sure she saw an exit door when she was first manifesting into the circus, and resolves to find it again, even after Cane assures her it doesn't exist. He also tries to take her mind off of things by sending the gang on an adventure! Adventures are an important part of life in the circus. They give you something to do and prevent you from going insane. See, look how sane everyone still is! Cane summons a horde of mischevious little Mario 64 enemies and tells them to go hunt them all down before vanishing.

The rest of the episode splits into two subplots, as Pomni tries to find the escape and the others contend with the creature that became of Kaughmo.

When your mind refuses to accept the virtual world for long enough, you "de-cohere" and become a mad, rampaging glitch monster. Any physical contact with one of these entities will cause you to start painfully glitching as well.

In the end, Pomni finds the exit, but - after going through a bunch of nonsense Source-looking virtual office rooms - she simply finds herself floating in a digital void.

Fortunately(?), exiting the digital circus gets Cane's attention. He pulls her back in, and - now that his attention has been returned to the place - he's able to undo the corruption-injuries that other members of the troupe have suffered from what used to be Kaughmo.

Unfortunately, there's no un-corrupting Kaughmo himself. Cane assures the others that there's nothing to worry about, everything will be just fine, as he stuffs the glitch-monster into a prison cell with many others like it.

There appears to be many more imprisoned glitch-monsters than there are coherent troupe members.

As for that exit door? Well, Cain says, Pomni now understands why Cain tried to get her to forget about it. You see, he hasn't decided what to put behind that door yet. Apart from it being dangerous for troupe members to go there, he really doesn't like it when people see his unfinished work.

The final scene has Cain taking everyone's mind off of things by summoning a delicious simulated feast for them to enjoy. They don't need food, or sleep for that matter, but the taste is one of their few genuinely pleasant diversions. The other troupe members sit down to eat, apparently already conditioned to not cling on to their memories of Kaughmo. Pomni doesn't eat. Just stares straight ahead. Knowing that eventually, she'll become just like them at best.

There's also one last live-action shot of a computer with a VR headset plugged into it. No sign of a body. Either "Pomni's" real body was disintegrated, or it slumped to the floor out of frame, or she got up and left unknowingly leaving a virtual copy of herself imprisoned behind her.


Visually, the sheer scale of Cane's saturated virtual realm is really impressive. Absolutely captures the feeling of being a flea on the back of a candy-colored elephant. The animation is extremely smooth, and somehow manages to look like an N64 game without actually being restricted to blurs and polygons like one.

It looks the way you remember an old game looking from your childhood, not the way one actually looks on the screen.

Character-wise, most of the cast are pretty one note so far (I only remember Kaughmo's name because they kept talking about him so much). There's the one who tries her best to be kind, the one who copes by being mean, the one who copes by developing agoraphobic and hoarding tendencies, etc. The only two who have had a chance to really show their nuances to any great degree are Pomni and Cane.

Pomni is great protagonist material. The show made the right choice by taking the "Tales of Amphibia" approach and showing us the new world before dropping the hapless protag into it, rather than following said protag during the drop. It emphasizes the oppressive and ubiquitous nature of the circus, and also gets us a little closer to Pomni's own situation of not being able to remember who or where she was before. Her being defiant, being traumatized, and being in denial are perfectly balanced to never get frustrating to watch. Her resolve in hunting through the vast nonsense realm until she finds that goddamned door again is admirable, as is the hesitation she feels in leaving a glitch-wounded acquaintance who she doesn't know how to help behind. The palpable frustration she feels at not even being allowed to swear when the situation very much calls for it is, again, painfully relatable.

I feel like there's an element of "be careful what you wish for" with her character, but I'm not sure yet. Why did she put on the VR headset? Was she trying to escape something? Put something off? Forget about something? I'd have to see more episodes to know that that's the route the show is going, but it's the vibe I get.

Cane, meanwhile, is a perfect cross between irresponsible preschool teacher, self-important indie game developer, and the dark god Yaldaboath. Something that makes him interesting - as well as very true to at least one major current of gnostic demonology - is that he's not really malevolent, exactly. At least, not on purpose. He seems to earnestly think he's creating a fun, engaging adventure for guests who genuinely want to be there, and seems to undergo a kind of paralytic cognitive dissonance when confronted with evidence to the contrary (there's one bit where his face actually gets the Windows bluescreen over it before he appears to "reboot" and forget all about the challenging revelation). Likewise, imprisoning his tormented-beyond-coherence victims seems to be the best he can do for them, and he comes across as uncomprehending of their suffering rather than callous to it.

I also wonder what he IS, exactly. The obvious answer would be that he's an AI on the fritz, but the fact that he can apparently leave his realm and have coffee at a simulated cafe for a while until his attention is called back by Pomni breaching the void - or even WANTS to do so, rather than being purely devoted to his work - makes me unsure.

Could be that AI's have a whole virtual civilization on the 'net. Could be that he's an actual supernatural being who somehow got tangled up in the digital world in much the same way that he's since entangled humans in it. In any case, the fact that there's no malice in Cane kind of makes the situation even more hopeless. If he was causing harm on purpose, then you could at least theoretically appease or convince him to stop. You can't even meaningfully communicate with him, though. He doesn't seem able to hold the concept of a person leaving, or even wanting to leave, in his mind.

They're not quite the same, but you can definitely catch shades of Little Runmo's own incoherent demiurge figure in Cane. On top of the general parallels of "character struggling against confines of the game they're in." There are even some explicit reference to Little Runmo here and there throughout the pilot, like someone mentioning the possibility of having a wheel of fortune in one's stomach.

The undercurrent of transness running through TADC is also much stronger than it was in Little Runmo. On top of the obvious body dysphoria connection, the theme of alienation from the environment - the feeling that you aren't who this world was meant for, and that the consequences of being continually out of place could be disastrous - also speaks to the trans experience. The aspect of videogames and the internet as an escape that can just as easily turn prison, well...we're probably the most disproportionately online demographic that exists.

I have at least one more episode of Digital Circus in queue, though it won't be up for a while. It's got a difficult balancing act to maintain of not falling into the trap of being either too bleak or too sarcastic that I suspect will only get harder as the series continues, but it's off to a good start and I'd be happy to learn that it manages to keep up the quality.