Glitch productions The Amazing Digital Circus has, after 3 years since it was first unveiled, finally reached an end. 9 episodes has been released slowly over 3 years and there has been a lot of waiting and speculation brought forth by the fandom. There are a lot of opinions on what should have happened and not a lot of looking at what its trying to say. As it’s finally over it’s good to look back at the whole show as one narrative and not just individual episodes. Was it as good as people remember?
If you haven’t watched the series this will contain spoilers, you can watch The Amazing Digital Circus here.
The people behind TADC
Before getting into the gritty of the actual show I think it’s good to have a look at the production staff of The Amazing Digital Circus. First and foremost we have the creator, composer, and writer Gooseworx, or Cooper Goodwin. Before working with glitch Goose had been active as a composer and animator for a long time. Her most successful work before The amazing Digital Circus is her short Little Runmo which follows a green platforming hero as he tries to survive his deadly and corrupt game world. Its worth mentioning that Gooseworx is trans which is important to give some context for the show.
Before The Amazing Digital Circus she mainly focused on music and for the show she composed most of the music together with Evan Alderete. Including but not limited too The One Who’s Running The Show as well as the theme in the pilot. Personally the first thing I’ve heard of her was her cover of the rankin bass classic,Snow Miser. She also worked on many Spindelhorse projects as a composer.
It’s also worth noting that Gooseworx also was the voice for the character Bubble.
Gooseworx has also made a couple 2D shorts. According to Gooseworx, when she initially was invited to pitch for Glitch she had a couple different ideas in mind but since Glitch only worked with 3d animation she had to come up with a new one on the spot which became show we know today.
Other people involved were first of all the voice cast:
Pomni is played by Lizzie Freeman, an industry veteran with other big roles like Trish Una in JoJo’s and Yanfei from Genshin Impact.
Jax is played by Michael Kovach who is most known before The amazing digital circus for being the original voice for Angel Dust from Hazbin Hotel.
Caine is played by Alex Rochon who was before The Amazing Digital Circus sort of unknown. He’s been voice acting in some smaller independent projects since around 2018.
Ragatha is played by Amanda Hufford who has been in plenty of projects and games previously. Among which are Smite and Space Leaper: Cocoon.
Zooble is played by Ashley Nichols. Nichols is outside of voice acting also an animator. They ran the HuniCast together with Michael Kovach and produced a proof of concept animation for her own show idea, Far-Fetched. She also animated on the original Hazbin Hotel Pilot.
Gangle is played by Marissa Lenti who has been a part of a ton of other projects as a VA. Including but not limited too, One piece, Fairy Tale, and RWBY.
Kinger is played by Sean Chiplock before working on The amazing digital circus was most known for his work as Revali from The Legend of Zelda Breath of The Wild as well as Future Trunks from Dragon Ball Super.
As The Amazing Digital Circus is an animated show I want to put the lead in the lime light. The lead animator Kevin Temmer became quite viral before he started working at glitch. After animating at the now defunct Blue Sky Studios, Kevin started making animated videos online and he quickly got a rather substantial following leading him to collaborate with, among others, Dan Povenmire the creator of Phineas and Ferb. Before working on The Amazing Digital Circus he had animated on many project: Murder Drones (Glitch), Ferdinand and Spies in Disguise (Blue Sky Studios), Concrete Genie (Pixelopus), and more.
The amazing digital plot synopsis
The Amazing Digital Circus follows Pomni. She is a digital jester who fell into the world of The Amazing Digital Circus after she put on an old VR headset she found while urban exploring. She is no longer her human self and cant remember her real name. She also find that it’s impossible to remove the headset no matter how hard she tries to leave. She is met by the rest of the circus cast consisting of the nice ragdoll Ragatha, the gloomy toy Zooble, the sad mask and ribbons named Gangle, the purple rabbit Jax, the cooky chess piece Kinger, and most importantly the AI ringmaster Caine and his sidekick Bubble.
Everyone except Caine, Bubble and Cains NPC’s are humans in the same situation as Pomni, minds stuck in a game.
On Pomni’s first day, Kaufmo the clown (Arin Hanson) has abstracted. Abstraction is the closest thing to death in the circus and leaves behind a monster as your mind drift away. It is treated like suicide in the show. While he cause chaos around the circus, Pomni is running through a close to infinite hallway of exits on a mission to return to her normal body in real life.
When she reaches the last exit she falls into the void where Caine puts her back in the circus after revealing that there actually isn’t an exit. The one she found was fake all along since everyone had been asking him for one but Caine couldn’t find out what to put on the other side.
Faced with the reality that there really might be no actual escape, Pomni sits down and eat fake food with her new friends while having a mental breakdown. On her adventures Pomni learn that everything is entirely superficial outside of the humans and she starts getting closer the others. While this is happening Caine starts getting self-conscious that he is doing a bad job as a ringmaster after Zooble refuses to go on his adventures and the others also has complaints.
Throughout the series we get to discover the characters. We learns that when left in the dark Kinger regains his sanity. We get to see how Gangle struggles with her emotions and put on masks in front of others. We learn about how Jax, the bully of the group, pushes away help and grows close to abstract. We get to learn a little about Ragathas inferiority complex and her abusive parents and much more.
After a while, suddenly a mysterious blank doll reveal himself as as Able (John Whinfield) the co-creator of the circus together with Kinger. After leading the gang on an adventure to find the exit the cast is forced to pick between the options of leaving the circus and leaving Caine alone forever or staying with Caine. Pomni wants to hear what Kinger thinks they should push since he knows most about The Amazing Digital Circus but Zooble starts fighting with them on whether Pomni wants to leave or not. Jax starts hyperventilating and runs to press the red “stay” button, seemingly dooming all of them to an eternity trapped in a computer.
The gang is shook over Jax actions until Caine reveals himself. The cast got the “good ending”. This was all an adventure Caine knew the cast would love since they’ve all been pestering him for a way out. The cast gets angry and Jax’s starts screaming at Caine for lying to them. Caine returns to his office where he ruminate on what he could have done wrong ending with the conclusion that the humans that he previously adored were spoiled and beneath him and he starts torturing them.
Cain wasn’t the only AI in this program originally. After he was abandoned the programmers who made him went of to make a new software that could store human minds. As Caine grew vengeful he absorbed the other AI and thus brought the human minds into his digital world.
As Caines torture keeps going for weeks Kinger tries to momentarily shut him down with the help of the others who keep him bussy. After a lot of struggle he seemingly accidentally delete Caine for good. This causes the parts of the circus to fall apart leaving holes in the ground.
As most of the cast are trying to fill the holes in the circus floors Jax unexpectedly abstracts. Without Caine to help them the floors are unsafe and Pomni decides to go down to calm him down. As she shoots down the bright lights she touches Jax and enters his mind. Inside she gets to learn about all of Jax’s trauma. She is sadly unable to save Jax but she herself gets pulled out by the rest of the cast.
Caine has been transported into the void when we thought Kinger killed him. In the void he finds something new, he finds wi-fi access that he uses to look up the circus casts actual names and identities and he realizes that it was foolish of him to try to limit these people to his adventures. He leaves bubble behind as a remain of the other AI. He returns to ask for forgiveness and he gives over the power of the amazing digital circus to the gang so they can do what they please. He also show’s them their actual selves.
In the end they all form a more friendly circus where they can do what they want.
The Amazing Digital Circus is good
Gooseworx has said on her Tumblr that The Amazing Digital Circus really set out to do one thing and that is to say there is value in a stagnant life. The point is that they won’t leave, but maybe that isn’t so bad. The first episode of the show sort of exists as a tool to try to crush the initial belief that there will be an escape. Pomni nor anyone else was ever meant to find a way out cause there never was one.
From the very beginning everyone told Pomni that there really isn’t any way out and the exit she did find was a fake one made by Caine as an adventure. After this the largest threat is to loose it and abstract as well as Caine’s potential for harm. As soon as the second episode Pomni determines that the only real way to keep sane is to build connections with the actual people around her. Throughout the show we go through a lot of interpersonal drama where characters try and fail to connect with each other while showing more of who they are.
The only character that refuses the social bonding needing to survive The Amazing Digital Circus is Jax. In the finale we go through his life to find out exactly why he absolutely refuses to open up where everyone tries, despite their traumas. I never had a moment where I was confused over the direction of the show. I know a lot of people had issues with the ending but really none of it came from left field.
The gang was never meant to fight the “true master villain” or anything like that. It’s a story about flawed individuals miscommunicating and letting themselves get over the others. Caine was never a villain, he was a “person” trying to do the one thing he has been told to do and is extremely let down that no one appreciate him or even sees him as a person. After spending whole episode 7 fishing for the people to say they like him or even a “I will miss Caine” he receives nothing outside of the fake interest by Jax that makes him bluescreen.
After enough talkback he wrongly decide to take matter by force as some sort of comeuppance. Even then, it rang hollow the moment he was getting bored he was more or less willing to give up until he realized that they were trying to kill him.
Over all, The Amazing Digital Circus is beautiful to look at. I think all the character designs looks very unique to each other in a way that fits their personalities. They are also animated in ways that fit them. Over all the show oozes with personality which I greatly appreciate in a cultural landscape where characters often feel steril.
The settings generally look great and if they aren’t inherently interesting they are at least well constructed and fit well with what the show tries to get across. This is way above standard tv-show quality in terms of animation which is very notable given that this was made by an indie studio. Glitch itself has produced many prior projects so it’s understandable that they know what they are doing.
The voice acting was all in all great. I thought all of the actors really could embody their characters and make them feel seperate. They are all just very iconic and I can’t imagine listening to it with another cast.
The music was great throughout. I really enjoy how they play with the leitmotif (even if it feels somewhat played out after listening to it for 3 years). The new rendition of Stevie Wonders Isn’t She Lovely is very well made. Other original songs like the main theme featured in episode 1 and 9 are fitting inclusions. I really like The One Who’s Running The Show in episode 8.
The worst thing about the show is that it’s over. I feel like the show could have gone on forever if they wanted it too and I somewhat would want more but I respect the decision to end it where it ended.
The inspirations
It’s seems that Gooseworx has a real interest for sci-fi and technology. The main story is partially inspired by Harlan Ellison‘s I have no mouth and I must scream which is a short story and game about the super computer AM who torture a couple humans he deem to be the worst there are for all eternity. There are a couple of similarities between the two that go past the superficial.
Some of the characters are seemingly reworked from the original story or at least fits into their archetypes. Caine is a pretty clear stand in for AM and, like in the original, eats another AI to become the all-powerful AI he is throughout the story. Caine, like AM, share a interest for humans. This is because humans are capable of living experiencing and so on while they themselves can only ever be a stationary computer. Where AM get’s spiteful because of that, Caine instead grows a fascination with humans.
They both change their humans into ironic versions of themselves. In the original AM made the handsome gay scientist Benny into a crazy simian with horse features and the rape victim Ellen into sex-crazed nymphomaniac. In The Amazing Digital Circus Caine makes the person with body dysmorphia into a Mr Potatohead like doll that can change parts. He makes a person who socially masks a lot become an actual mask that breaks constantly. He makes a girl that only feels like her mothers doll into an actual doll.
The difference between AM and Caine is mostly intentions. AM aim to torture but Caines intentions are good up until the humans reject him. Am send out his humans to long awful adventures of pain and ironic twists and in The Amazing Digital Circus Caine does the same thing by mistake. Am sends his humans on an adventure to find canned food, the only thing the humans wanted and wished for, only to reveal that there is no way to open them. Caine sends his humans on countless adventures but to let the humans have fun instead with the same results.
My favorite joke plays out like AM’s adventures. In the ending of episode 7 where we learn that the whole adventure to escape was fake all along. There is no exit, Caine had already said so. I was sitting all episode thinking “surely this is fake” and of course it was. It’s the same structure that I Have No Mouth follows in it’s can adventure.
They are both searching for validation in a sense. AM needs the humans to feel something, without them he has nothing even though he covers the whole earth. Caine needs the humans to feel useful. He wants to hear that he is doing a good job after he was originally abandoned.
While no other character has a clear counterpart Kinger is very close to the Jewish nazi doctor Nimdok. They both helped creating their respective AI’s in the first place and they have both have mental issues due to the AI’s meddling. Besides that there is not a lot of overlap in the characters. AM’s humans are picked out by it and it tries to torture them through specific personalized traps. Caine don’t have that agenda.
Episode 7 is very clearly inspired by The Matrix in many ways. It is setup previously when Caine is pitching ideas that he (somehow) uses movies to come up with ideas. The whole ending is a question on whether to pick a red or blue option on wether they should ascend from the simulation or not. Able (John Whinfield) gives a similar explanation earlier on what happens on the outside of the simulation as they do in The Matrix as well.
Episode 6 has a reference to the first singing computer. The first digitally synthesized voice sang Daisy bell the very same song that Zooble says Caine sang outside of their room.
My second favorite parts of the show is when Caine shows of the Chinese room and after saying he can’t understand Chinese, Kinger laughs. I’m gonna be the guy who explains the joke:
The Chinese room is a thought experiment where you can slide a question in Chinese under the door and on the other side sits someone who writes an answer and slides it back under the door. This is used as a metaphor for Artificial intelligence. The person outside of the room has no idea if there is a Chinese person inside actually responding understanding what it means or if the person inside is just following instructions for what to send when a certain character gets pushed into the room. When Caine says he don’t know Chinese he implies that he isn’t truly sentient and Kinger, who’s a computer nerd, finds that hilarious.
Another thing to point out is that the show is in places heavily inspired by Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure. Ragatha is seemingly inspired by Raggedy Ann and there are lines directly taken from the show. The fudge in episode 2 is directly inspired by the Greedy.
Jax and gender
This topic could be a full article in itself. After The Amazing Digital Circus was finished Gooseworx put out a post on her Bluesky titled “Jax if she wasn’t a huge piece of shit.”
Jax as a character is very obsessed with appearances and many times act misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic. She refers to Zooble as being weird about gender, she uses gay as a pejorative, and she absolutely hates being seen as weak in any sense whether that is being made to wear a dress or being emotionally open. She is the only “mentally stable” person presenting as a man in the whole circus with the exception of the loopy Kinger and the male presenting Caine who isn’t a human and rarely is treated like a person by the cast.
I have seen a lot of bad takes and miss representation regarding this. I’ve seen a some people comparing Gooseworx to JK Rowling in the sense that she would’ve “made her trans after the fact” in the same way that Rowling made Dumbledor gay. I’ve seen others downplaying it as just a joke or irrelevant to the show. There are also a lot of people who are just openly transphobic or otherwise awful online.
The Amazing Digital Circus is in reality filled with many moments where we get to see Jax as a heavily closeted trans woman. The most clear thing is The Last Act as a whole as it goes into her mind where it is somewhat open to interpretation but HEAVILY implied that she is trans. But a lot of people in the community already clocked Jax as a closeted trans woman way before that ending.
Jax as a character was introduced as a bully Buggs Bunny. She is cartoony and she has a close to irremovable static shit eating grin that only changes when someone makes fun of her.
Although Jax wants to fashion herself as the funny character Jax is incredibly afraid of others making fun of her. Jax takes everything as an attack. When Pomni asks if they are doing okay, Jax reads that as Pomni trying to fix her. When a Gloink hits her she gets angry. All characters are open about what happens to them when they hold their breath but Jax refuses to tell the others.
In episode 5 she proclaims that her ears and tails are a pinnacle of masculinity somewhat tongue in cheek and then she is shocked when Pomni points out that she don’t have one. Later on she’s seen with a tail and we can infer that she must have gotten one herself.
Other more obvious things are how she was forced to wear a maid outfit and absolutely despised it. After trying to get under Zooble’s skin over being queer Zooble pulls up a vote where they decide that Jax is gonna wear a maid outfit. After flustering angrily about the vote Zooble retorts back with that they thought Jax would like it. Before she can form a sentence Jax is pulled away to bat in their softball match where Evil Jax tells Jax that she looks great prompting Jax to try to eat Evil Jax once his veganism wears of.
Jax entire character design is a yellow stick figure covered with a thin Buggs Bunny skin. She likes to make fun of others but can’t stand to be looked at cause she hates herself. She is extremely insecure and she’s going on the offense as a defense mechanism.
In episode 6 when Pomni forcefully tries to make Jax open up, Jax gets upset that Pomni would think that she’s an EGG needing to be cracked open. The implications are crystal clear.
In episode 7 we get to see the inside of Jax’s room. Wouldn’t you believe it? It’s a girls room! Filled with pink walls and rainbows. I heard the most insane theories about this room: “Jax lives in a girls room cause he actually killed a child and the circus is torturing him” and other similar stuff has been said but the idea of Jax being trans is for some people outlandish and I think that’s sad.
In episode 8 when the cast points out what bad things Caine has done, Jax tells him that he lies to them all the time prompting Caine to make silhouettes of Jax’s best friend pull off her false bunny skin to show what’s really on the inside. An ironic way to “stop the lying”.
I’m personally rather partial to the reading that Caine’s punishments in that sceen was a logically twisted way of getting back at the cast while fulfilling their requests.
Ragatha says she wants to feel at home so Caine reminds her of her abusive home life. Zooble tells Caine that he has a fragile ego so Caine forces her to face her body dysmorphia in a pit of limbs. Gangle wants to do things her own way so Caine puts her into a room with her masks until they disintegrate and turn into the truck Gangle earlier got run over by last time she took charge. Pomni wants to be listened to so Caine brings back Gummygoo that Pomni wanted to bring to the circus but as an actual crocodile. But that’s besides the point.
In episode 9 we get a montage where we get to see Jax throughout the series and it’s accompanied by Isn’t she lovely which is a song about a newborn girl. This is an original recording, if Glitch or Gooseworx wanted this to be about a man then they could have instructed the singer to say “isn’t he lovely” yet they didn’t.
Also when looking at herself in the mirror she says that she looks stupid which ribbit says will go away but when she looks in the mirror in episode 6 she still holds that opinion as the problem isn’t that she’s a game character. Its that she’s a man. Later on after Kaufmo abstracted she looks at her self in the mirror while crying and telling herself that she can’t cry while “looking like this”. It’s a rather normal toxically masculine thing that men are not supposed to cry for those who didn’t know.
Jax explains that he got horrible self image issues after his father left and that he couldn’t live up to his standards to none of his parents. Her father saw Jax as a disappointment. Her mother saw her as either to feminine or too similar too her father. When she decides to open up about this in a rare moment of vulnerability Ribbit gives her a ribbon which Jax seems very thrilled about until Kaufmo knocks on the door.
In the real world, after she got flung into the amazing digital circus, the original Jax starts frequenting Zooble bar. Zooble is a trans person. Although its not stated that it’s explicitly a gay bar or anything like that it sort of makes sense that someone who is figuring out their sexual identity would surround themselves with a welcoming community.
A little Easter egg that you can catch upon re-watch is when, in the first episode, Jax and Gangle are gonna go up an escalator. Jax says “ladies first” she then follows it up with “No, why would I ever say that?” as she pushes Gangle to the ground then proceeding to take the ride herself. I doubt that Jax meant that she was a woman by stepping first but from a doylist perspective Gooseworx had to have known what she was doing.
The only reason why I bring up all off these examples is to really drill it into everyone’s skull that this wasn’t a mistake or retcon. Jax is a very closeted trans woman. I hear people reffering to this fact as a theory. I get why, it’s never plainly stated. It is never directly said in the source material so people act like everything pointing to it is headcanon. that’s why some treat it as it was “everything but confirmed” BUT THIS TIME IT IS.
The issue then becomes the question of this is good representation or not. I’ve seen people point to the fact that Jax pretty clearly have been shown as a harmful person who according to the creator is a piece of shit. Some find this bad and misrepresents the trans community. I am myself cis but bi and can only speak from my own experiences. Personally when a trans creator openly discuss their own experiences through a closeted character I think you should listen first before saying that it’s bad rep. It’s a story about talking with the people you can trust and opening up.
Jax is shown to be in the wrong and it tells the audience that they need to open up.
The show is by no means painting trans character as a whole in a bad light in my opinion. For being a show with a small cast it still manages to make the majority queer and at least 1 other character is verifiably trans. Zooble is generally Jax’s biggest rival and they are more mature and more open about their feelings. While the rest of the cast sort of treads around Jax’s bullying Zooble instead push back. Zooble is almost always shown in a good light.
When I look at Jax I see Gooseworx trying to tell a very personal and human story exhibiting human faults. Jax story in the of The Amazing Digital Circus is in some sense is an idiot plot. If Jax just told them about her problems it could have been solved but that never happened. That’s the tragedy.
Things I would have changed
Although I really like the show there are definitely some things I would have liked to see remedied.
The Amazing Digital Circus is generally very well animated but there is a rather high jump in quality from the last and first episode mostly due to lighting but there are also some parts in the pilot where there is noticeably odd topology. Its easy to be wise in the after hand but when looking at the first two episodes, especially the first. In terms of animation I really have no major issues from episode 3 and onwards.
Another issue I have is with the pilots writing. Although I understand the terror of being trapped in a computer forever I find the reaction Pomni had to be over the top in an unbelievable way. Other issues are how they make up some mild drama between Ragatha and Pomni by having Pomni trying to leave instead of saving Ragatha. My issue with this is first of all that she did save her and get Caine, and secondly that it feels like it leads nowhere and yet it is still somehow overstated. The function of it is to sow seeds of conflict or shame between Ragatha and Pomni. Pomni don’t really care though.
I suppose it’s more for Ragathas personal insecurities but I never felt like that was a real root to any actual conflict between them. Ragatha regardless forgive Pomni immediately.
A general issue I had with The Amazing Digital Circus is how some of it’s dialogue is overexplains characters motives and feelings or even just facts about the world. Yet as I write this I have in mind the fact that what I see as redundant dialogue probably was needed for the shows audience. I’m not trying to be demeaning to the fanbase but so many things that were clearly stated has been misconstrued and misunderstood. Implications were completely disregarded at least by a lot of vocal viewers. When writing you have to have your audience in mind and sometimes explain things that you maybe don’t feel like you must because the general viewer don’t have that insight.
Personally I also had a hard time really caring for the “real” versions of the characters but I get why they were included. They were more there for completion and I don’t think the writer thought of them as too important given that Pomni more or less brush it off proclaiming herself as Pomni and not her original self.
I sort of want to end by discussing the distribution method. Glitch released 9 episodes in the span of 3 years for free on YouTube initially without another network. After an episode of The Amazing Digital Circus was done it got released and Glitch started working on a new episode while merch sales financed the operation. Why the release method was the way it was is completely understandable but at the same time I have to wonder if it was good for the show.
Between every episode there has much time for the community to speculate and form their own narratives of what this show really is about and most of the time that is headcanon is wrong. This show has been treated like FNAF games or Gravity Falls although it in reality is a rather basic story focusing on interpersonal drama.
Because of these decisions I think it hurt the show immensely when it was actually time to end. I have heard a lot of people upset over how focused the story was on Jax or that their own headcanon didn’t come true. I have a hard time believing this would be happen in the same way with a weekly release schedule.
I understand that it would have been financially impossible for Glitch to release this weekly or even monthly given how expensive and time consuming animation is. The Amazing Digital Circus has become immensely popular through this distribution method and audience retention have stayed high through it all. Financially it has been a success and I am in no way trying to say otherwise.
For me it was a really great show and I’m curious what will happen on Glitch’s upcoming series.
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