Pictured Above: Smiling robots in rubber hose style are common to both the propaganda in Armsby’s world and progress updates on the series itself.
Courtesy of David James Armsby on Facebook
By Baron Reichenbach
A monster in an alley is approached by a girl with a slice of cake, surrounded by graffiti and propaganda declaring: “Don’t feed the freaks.”
This 2016 sketch in candlelit monochrome evolved into the animated dystopian anthology series Autodale. Since the release of its first animated installment, “Being Pretty,” the following year, the independent animation and its creator have gained something of a cult following. It’s most recent installment, “Immortal Machine,” was released Jan. 22 of this year.
The series is set, in most episodes, in its namesake town: a walled suburb reminiscent of stereotypical 1950s America, populated by the robotic, cheery-voiced Handymen running it and “pretty” people in eerie white masks raising nuclear families who are fed rubber hose propaganda in the town’s many PSAs and children’s media. Armsby’s notes dub it “a world with individuality.”
As the setting of a given scene crawls deeper into the heart of the town, the utopian mask peels back to show the dystopia: fenced-off camps where nonconformists are disposed of, and the Gigeresque central tower, where an inventor calling himself “the Mayor” watches his creation from the shadows and a giantess dubbed “the Matriarch” is suspended on life support.
Autodale was created by David James Armsby, an independent filmmaker, artist, sculptor and animator. He publishes his work on YouTube and Patreon under the name Dead Sound. The YouTube channel, as of the writing of this article, has 712,000 subscribers, with 759 paid patrons supporting Armsby’s work through Patreon.
Armsby’s short films, including the Autodale series, tend to be almost entirely his own work, with other contributors in the form of voice actors and composers. His animation style, a mix of 2D backgrounds and scenery with 3D, cell-shaded Blender models, is comparable to franchises such as Rooster Teeth’s RWBY and Netflix’s The Dragon Prince.
Armsby has cited artists and authors such as H. R. Giger and H. P. Lovecraft, films like District 9 and video games such as Limbo and The Last of Us, as both visual and conceptual inspiration.
While the world of Autodale grew beyond Armsby’s original sketch, the monochrome palette remained, providing a canvas for the intensity of the colors which do show up: vibrant red for blood, and warm sepia for fire, sunlight and the outside world—a once-fantastical world which Armsby describes as “leaving (Autodale) behind.”
The seven short films (nine including the prequel series) explore themes of naivety, conformity, and change. As a result, children often serve as central characters—being targeted by propaganda, growing up under model parents or befriending the monstrous inhabitants of the outside world.
As Armsby hints in his “making of” videos, it requires the eye of a child to see the good, or at least equality, in something which is outwardly ugly or monstrous, and vice versa.
