IndieSpam

The Bloody Mary is a new pilot made by the newly founded Japanese indie studio: Studio Wrong.

Studio Wrong has for about 2 years time built an audience on many relevant social websites by making shorter videos and showing of works in progress and animation tests. This lead them to have around 300k subscribers on YouTube and over 1 million followers across all platforms before the pilot was even released.

The Bloody Mary: Their first big project

The story follows Betty (eng. Anne Yatco), a girl who is really into the occult, as well as her demon friend Seeka (eng. Laura Stahl), who is a deer demon who got summoned in their earlier short The Collision. In the episode, Betty takes a sketchy job as a ghost hunter and forces Seeka to join her on a quest to hunt The Bloody Mary (eng. Xanthe Huynh) so they can pay their bills.

I think the first thing that you have to give The Bloody Mary is just an applaud for how it looks. It seems to be made with a lot of care and and is beautifully rendered. Often the surroundings look realistic which fits the sort of horror vibes they are going for.

The general character designs are rather nice looking although it sort of seems like all in the main cast is made after the same base model. I think Betty fits really well as a ghost hunter with her light goth esthetic. All characters fit their role except for maybe Seeka who generally just looks like a deer person and not particularly demonic. There is also some light clipping here and there. It’s incredibly impressive for only having been animated by 2 people.

I also like the action scene and some comedy moments. There is a big fight against a murderer approaching the end of the episode and it looks really great as a whole.

The pilot is genre-wise a comedy with some action and horror elements in theme with the urban legend that is the bloody Mary. There are some things I really do like. In the beginning Betty talks about how she would kill a ghost and later her method gets used in an imaginative way to defeat the main villain of the episode. Its not the epitome of story telling but it is a pretty satisfying conclusion.

The Bloody Mary is almost like an Easter egg hunt on re-watch and is very fun. The masked murderer makes a big deal out of a mask that Seeka is wearing before he is revealed to be a masked murderer, which when re-watched becomes a pretty cute detail. The same goes for a door which is an invisible force field of sorts, there is a blink and you’ll miss it moment where Seeka walks through the door opening and and you can clearly see the force field before its revealed but its so slight that if you don’t know to look for it you’ll miss it.

I think it is generally rather funny although I must question some of the inclusion. There are a couple references to Garry’s mod or at least source engine games. These have been a staple of the online animation community where a lot of animated shows have been animated within the source film maker or Gmod directly. Think things like SMG4.

Here in The Bloody Mary it rings rather hollow though. Where they pretty easily can do these sorts of jokes in SFM animations this is made in blender which is a separate animation software that don’t render similarly. TADC do some similar jokes in regards to glitching but that show is also set within a computer where it is par for the course. Here it doesn’t feel as natural. It is not the end of the world or anything and can be funny if you like it.

When I first watched the pilot I had personally seen none of their previous work. I went into the pilot thinking it was an English speaking production. I thought to myself that it felt like someone trying to recreate a Japanese show in the way the dialog was written as well as other jokes since it felt very much like anime usually do.

I’m not trying to generalize the genre but the way some sentences were structured sounded more like translation which it seems to be. You can listen to either the English or the Japanese dub through their pilot. I don’t necessarily see this as an issue or anything but listening back to back I generally prefer the vocal direction in the Japanese.

Studio Wrong: The production company

The project is from japan and is produced by Koji Aomatsu and directed by Shigekuni Nakamura. I can’t find a lot regarding Shigekuni except for some of his animation reels. Some of that might relate to me not speaking Japanese and they might have been more active in their own language which I have a limited ability to parse through. I did however find a little bit more about how the company is operated and how they could have gotten so much quality animation done in such a short time with very few obvious income streams.

The studio hasn’t until recently started selling merch, there hasn’t been any crowdfunding as far as I’m aware, and it’s obviously not a part of a streaming service or higher network. I started to look into it and found a blog post by Aomatsu. Aomatsu reveals that they have received multiple substantial investments too keep afloat (although how much exactly is unclear). These investments were from the venture capitalist firm Coreline. The firm specializes in American and Japanese tech businesses.

The main reason why I bring this up is partially to bring insight to how these smaller studios can get funding. It don’t necessarily need to be through crowdfunding or made with your own resources, you might get investments if you are lucky. The other reason why I bring this up is sort of to have a little discussion about what being indie even entails.

Studio Wrong calls itself an indie studio. I think it is great to have an idea of what they mean with this and what you’d think it is. I feel like there are a couple potential answers to the question of what an indie studio even is supposed to mean:

*A way to say that you are not a part of a bigger network or legacy studio (Disney, Warner bros, Toei, Etc.).

*A way to say that you are not funded by outside sources, to be independent.

*A way to say that you have a small team or maybe even a solo production.

*Just a shorthand to say you are looking for an online audience.

To me it feels like they are interested in being a bigger studio but that they aren’t there quite yet. In the same blog post as mentioned earlier Aomatsu mentions that he intend to make a company similar to that of Pixar or Apple. I don’t speak Japanese and I’m using translation tools so there might be some level of inaccuracy to my understanding. It does however seem to me like the plan isn’t to just create a small project but instead to become some sort of bigger entity.

What I mean to say is not that this project is invalid or anything since it received funding in the form of investments. Even with investments this is still a feet to have been accomplished for the team that they should be proud of. It’s rather to point out how very vast the definition of indie has become. The current “indie boom” has led to a lot of shows being made like The Bloody Mary, but there are also plenty of others like Street Catz that has been made from practically nothing.

The biggest current “indie studio” is Glitch a studio that has as of now had over 4 shows produced, a cinema release and works with people who left Disney. I really enjoy their shows but to me it seems a little odd to call an international hit like The amazing digital circus an indie production when it is in no way small or limited.

It is mostly odd to think something of that size can be considered somewhat equal a project with an extremely smaller budget.

The Bloody Mary and studio wrong isn’t as big as Glitch but when discussing a pilot and studio backed by venture capital it might be good to hold some reservations. This doesn’t lessen the quality of the awesome pilot they have created.

As a whole I thought the bloody Mary was a fun pilot and I hope Studio wrong creates more in this series.