Lately there has been a lot of discussion online regarding a movie very few has even seen. I’m of course talking about Jim Queen and The Quest for The Chloroqueer (original title: Jim Queen à la recherche de la Chloroqueer), BobbyPills feature length debut. I thought this would be a good time to look back at BobbyPills as a studio and what they have worked on up till now. From Peepoodo and The Super Fuck Space Friends to Jim Queen!
Starting off as Bobby prod
Before BobbyPills was BobbyPills it started of as Bobby prod. Bobby prod was founded by David Alric in 2008. There is seemingly no real difference made between the studios and BobbyPills features Bobby prod projects as their own work on their website. When questioned about this the on their Facebook in 2018, Bobby prod explains that “Boppy Prod & Bobbypills has the same boss, same DNA. And we often work with same artists.”
Although the studio started in 2008 very little is documented before 2013 when they released their first big hit, Les kassos. What we can gather from old web captures on archive.org is that they originally worked on developing different original IP:s, including the following.
The 3d animated genius caveman Toc-Toc,
The 6 nicotine addicted monsters Les Klopobeks,
The two aquarium fishes Moris and Rodney,
an ensemble of babysitting toys called Dest(R)oyz,
and lastly the boy luchador, King Lucho.
These show ideas where seemingly made before they pivoted to adult animation exclusively but even here some of their ideas still seemed to have some more adult themes like The Klopobeks which supposedly was gonna put a large focus on smoking.
Bobby prod is mostly known for channel+‘s animated skit comedy, The Wackos (original title: Les Kassos), which debuted 2013 and is currently still ongoing. The show was created by Yves Bigerel also known as Balak who is a french animator and writer. Outside of Bobby prod and BobbyPills he is also known as the creator of the french comic Lastman and it’s animated show.
The show is a satire about different pop-culture icons visiting a social worker to talk about their problems. The show is meant for an adult audience and has a lot of jokes that play on popular culture, politics, sex, violence, and generally more adult topics.
One episode of The Wackos is typically only 2 minutes long, cutting at a high tempo between different people who are having meetings with their social workers. For example, the first episode follows Han Solo and Leia as well as her elderly father Darth Vader who Han wants to put in a nursing home. In the same episode we also meet Donald Ducks wholesome nephews who are moving to the Hawaii gardens where they grow more delinquent.
Balak also worked again with Bobby prod shortly there after on some shorts about the the French Catherine and Liliane. These shorts are somewhat in the same vein as Les Kassos being short skits.
Although it started production under Bobby prod it was released under the BobbyPills name later. I would probably recommend to not get to caught in the differences between prod and pill as they are pretty much the same studios outside of titles.
They worked on an unreleased project called Q that seems to have been about 3 different young women and their sexual desires but it seems to have gotten stuck in production at some point. Q was created by Clarence Edgard-Rosa and Xavier Ramonède and according to Xavier, the show was meant to be called Q as it means “ass” in French but can also be understood as sex in general.
Some art of it can be found on dumps of the old Bobby prod website but I also just recommend you check out Xavier’s art as it is gorgeous. As opposed to the other Bobby projects up to this point this seemingly wasn’t meant to be a fast-paced comedy instead it was meant to be pornographic yet still in the short episode format. It’s unclear though to exactly what degree but if the info that was released is anything to go by it was seemingly meant to be very explicit with Xavier referring to it as “the porn project” on his Tumblr.
Clarence Edgard-Rosa and Xavier Ramonède also worked on another Bobby prod project called G.I.R.L (Girls in real life) that means to dissect women’s role on the screen. However, this series seems to be lost to time.
Another Bobby project in the same vein as Les Kassos, is Startup Heroes from 2016 by Alexis Beaumont and Benjamin Lacaze. The show follows different pop culture icons as they are trying to seek to crowdfund their projects. How else would Darth Vader afford a new Death Star?
Bobby prod also did shorts for the French gaming channel GG in 2016-2017. The shorts followed 2 dumb gamers as they do normal gaming activities like playing Wii fit with grandma, getting swatted after cheating in CS:GO, and being a little to invested in Chun Lee.
Blackpill, Peepoodo, Vermin, and Crisis Jung
BlackPill and Bobby prod together made a new animation studio when the BlackPill streaming platform was unveiled. this studio is Bobby pill which is the better known bobby studio today. Blackpill was a streaming platform that focused on producing original indie content mostly aimed at adults. I personally used the app when it was released as it was one of the few “indie” streaming services that was released in Europe as well as America but can’t really remember watching anything besides Explosm Entertainments Purgatony. Bobby pill regardless created a large amount of shows for the platform, all being between 5 to 10 minutes per episode.
In an article by Animation Magazine it was explained that the series was mainly meant to focus on an english speaking audience in contrast to Bobby Prods earlier work which had generally been for a French audience.
One of the first shows released under the BobbyPills studio was Monsieur Flap created by Nicolas Athané and Brice Chevillard, however the series started production under Bobby prod. it was released first in 2017. It’s a fun, cute, and absurd romcom about a dead mans sentient anus that tries to find love. That short description should clue you in that it often shows explicit material and almost all Bobby-media do on some level. Jim Queen is far from the first LGBTQ+ or explicit Bobbypills project.
On that note it’s time to talk about Peepoodo and the Super Fuck Friends. Peepoodo was created by Balak in 2017 and presents itself as a sexual education show for adults with a focus on absurd humor. Peepoodo is a pink hamster who lives in the magical forest together with his friends Tuffalo the Buffalo, Evelyn the polarbear, and the science expert Dr. Pussycat among others. As the show is to explicit to be on YouTube, after Blackpills went defunct it got uploaded to it’s own site.
Different episodes discuss different topics like impotence, tolerance, consent, anal and vaginal orgasms, and more. The first season received 18 episodes. Personally I think the series get’s a lot better as it goes with some of the first being particularly weak in my eyes. Most characters are pants-less at all time leaving their genitalls exposed.
I do however like the show (even though I don’t care to much for the German scat episode) and I think the show generally has it’s heart in the right place with a main focus on inclusivity and education.
The show received a revival after a successful crowdfunding campaign which lead to 8 more episodes of significantly higher quality.
On some level I see Peepoodo as sort of the main mascot of BobbyPills as a whole and I doubt they’d disagree.
From the initial wave of BobbyPill shows one of them was Vermin, or Chmite as it was originally called, released April 9th 2018. The show follows a timid mantis who leaves the forest to work as a cop in the bug city, just as his father once did. However he is immediately robbed and in his attempt to retrieve his belongings he get’s arrested and maimed by a lazy and abrasive fly. She believed him to be an illegal immigrant and was happy to finally arrest a criminal before they figure out that they actually work on the same force and are meant to be partners.
The series was originally produced under Bobby prod and there is another pilot for the show that shows of different pieces from the main series. The character designs are however quite different.
The show is a buddy cop sitcom where episodic struggles can be anywhere from having to pick up the police chiefs daughter in a night club that’s inside a flesh-light, to trying to solve a hostage negotiation.
One of my favorite BobbyPills shows from this time is Crisis Jung by Baptiste Gaubert and Jérémie Périn. This show to me is somewhat of a premonition of what BobbyPills would do more of in the future. It has a lot more of an anime esque art-style than their previous work and although it can be read as a comedy it also has a greater emphasis on action.
Crisis Jung follows the titular Jung as the ancient evil of Petit Jesus emerges and kills Jung’s lover, Maria. His heart shatters and as he is flung away by petit Jesus. He sheds a single tear prompting a hand to emerge from the ground and catch him where he is talking to a therapist inside himself until he is ready to emerge into the wasteland that Petit Jesus created in his absence. He is determined to not allow anyone else besides himself to suffer.
The show is what I imagine would happen if you put Fist of The Northstar, Xavier Renegade Angel, and Ru Paul’s Dragrace and put it in a mixer. There is so much to say about this show in particular and I feel like I someday have to do a complete analysis of it since it, although it’s very absurd, work with some rather complex messaging and theme’s that I think warrant some deeper reading. That’s for another day though.
Bobbypills Collabs: Games and superheroes
Outside of their own projects the studio has also worked on some rather high profile animated series and games, either for advertising or for the full productions.
They’ve worked on all trailers for the hit indie game, Dead cells, since back in 2018, as well as the animated mini-series Dead cells: imortalis from 2024. Motion twin, the developer behind Dead Cells, is a French studio so it makes sense that they’d be looking for a local option. They also worked on the trailer for Motion Twin’s later game, Windblown.
When it comes to other games they worked on Streets of Rage 4, Solasta, Ravenswatch, Valorant, and Frag.
Some of their most well known work is probably the Invincible teasers they worked on. BobbyPills was somewhat put in the limelight as Amazon’s Invincible failed to meet up to audience expectations with stilted animations that some liken towards power point presentations. In contrast to the lacking animation in the main show, the animated teasers made by BobbyPills were very wellmade and highly regarded to the point where people started to question on social media why the same care wasn’t being put towards the actual show.
They also animated on Ubisofts Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix, in 2023. The show is about Captain Laserhawk who lives the life as a mercenary in a universe where all Ubisoft character’s/franchise’s coexist. The show wants to explore the fascistic and racially divided world which I feel is congruent with themes that BobbyPills earlier seem interested in exploring as a studio.
I know there is some general animosity towards Adi Shankar, the creator of the Captain Laserhawk as well as a lot of other video game adaptions, and a lot of hate toward the incredibly stupid AI generated NFT Laserhawk game Ubisoft tried to sell. I think when it comes to a discussion around BobbyPills in context of laserhawk you have to be able to put those issues aside and look at what BobbyPills actually did. I understand completely if those things I mentioned has soured your taste on the project but that shouldn’t lessen the genuine accomplishment for the people who aren’t Shankar or Ubisofts economics team.
Another hero project they worked on is James Gunn’s Creature Commando for DC 2024. The show follows the Suicide Squad movie. After the occurrences in the Suicide Squad it was decided that humans could no longer be forced to implant bombs to serve as special agents. Instead of stopping the project all together the government decided to reboot it but with creatures that weren’t legally considered humans, thus creating the Creature commando.
The show slots well into BobbyPills line up as it has many themes regarding how society treats people and ascribe people the epithet of monster even if they are just misunderstood or forced into the positions they are in.
They also made opening sequences for My Adventures With Superman and worked as a third party contractor on it.
Also worth noting that they animated on The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball.
They also recently released a miniseries on the web in association with the French public service streaming service Arte, called Les Groos which follows two roommates. This one specifically is made by Bobby Prod. You can view the all episodes here.
What’s up with Jim Queen?
In the heat of the hate campaign toward Lesbian Space Princess (read more here) a lot of people started to turn their torches and pitchforks toward Jim Queen. Jim Queen is the studios first full length movie, focusing on the titular gay icon, Jim “Queen” Parfait. While the film is complete and finished it is currently doing a festival run before widespread distribution which means it’s close to completely inaccessible unless you are attending one of the film festivals it’s being screened at.
The movie is about Jim “Queen” Parfait, a hunky gay influencer beloved within the gay community. After Jim and the rest of Paris’ Gay population contracted an illness that is making them straight, Jim has to go on a quest to find the Chloroqueer to cure them and bring back queerness to Paris. He does this together with the immune and closeted twink, Lucien who is Jim’s biggest fan.
Most people discussing the film right now on social media aren’t attending festivals and thus they haven’t seen it. Although noone has seen it, the stated reason for why it is bad and should be slandered is either that “Jim queen is discriminatory towards straight people” or that it is “cringe”. When people say something is “cringe” because it’s obviously LGBTQ+ that’s just thinly veiled homophobia if they bother to hide it at all. It’s a smear campaign grounded on nothing.
Among the latest comments on trailers for the film we have people saying: “Honestly I would call that disease a blessing”, “heterophobia the movie”, “NEW TARGET FANDOMS ATTACKKKKKKKK!”, and more. I just thought it would be good to highlight some real examples on the disgusting nature some people are approaching this movie.
Why they say Jim queen is “heterophobic” is due to the heterosis disease within the film as it supposedly makes heterosexuality seem like an illness. This grievance, however, falls apart upon any examination. The issue with heterosis within the story is not that straight people exist but rather that queer people are forcibly converted by it against their will and the death of the queer community. On the Kickstarter page we even see a storyboard for a scene where a straight politician publicly talks about how upset she is that the gay people are claiming that heterosexuality is a disease and then directly starts bashing the woke mind-virus.
It’s satire. It’s also seemingly a self-fulfilling prophecy.
What I want to make clear is that there is no reason to imagine this film is particularly bad as some on the internet might imply. After 20 critic reviews Rotten Tomatoes rate it as fresh with a 95% rating. The only critic, as of writing this, that has rated it badly is Richard Lawson of The Hollywood Reporter. It is worth noting that the reason why he dislike it is not because it is “heterophobic”, but instead that he feels it is cliché. He means that the gay audience would want more nuance and originality and that the movie leans to much on old jokes.
I can not speak on whether I agree with him as I haven’t yet seen it yet. I was not invited to Cannes sadly. I do however think it’s a way more grounded reason to dislike it than any other I’ve heard. Outside of that specific review everything else points towards it being a good to great movie.
All in all, I find much interest in BobbyPills and their projects and I’m waiting patiently for Jim Queen to be properly released. It’s okay if you don’t love it, the important part is, if you have that opinion, that you’ve actually formed it yourself for reasons other than blind hate.
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