Spirit Juice

Spirit Juice is an animated short that follows an alien bartender in a series of misadventures. Throw in an unhinged robot scientist and the result is five minutes of bewildering chaos. While the crude animation may be charming to some, Spirit Juice’s eccentric idiosyncrasies are unlikely to be enough to keep an audience’s attention for the duration.

Visually, Spirit Juice has an appealing style to it. To be blunt, the character designs are ugly, but they’re unappealing in a likeable way. The short is unique in its unrefined quality, and it certainly doesn’t lack a distinct visual identity. Unburdened by standard animation conventions, the characters are free to be ugly and idiosyncratic. My favourite example of this is a character who amusingly appears to be a clip-art fax machine, incongruous with the other characters’ visual style and bringing to mind other animated shows that play against standard design conventions like Smiling Friends.

Sadly, this is where comparisons to various animated Adult Swim shows end. Spirit Juice lacks interesting or even funny writing, and each character ends up feeling fairly repetitive. There’s no narrative to speak of and fairly few funny situations that each character finds themselves in. The result is a sense of improvisation, with no rising action or destination for the short to move towards.

At only five minutes in length, it’s disappointing that Spirit Juice feels so aimless. I’ve already made the comparison to Smiling Friends, a show that does a much better job of setting up the premise and direction that an episode will move towards, before diving into the pure chaos that it’s known for. Spirit Juice feels as though it’s lacking any sense of structure, resulting in an audio-visual splatter thrown at the wall.

Unfortunately, this is further compounded by the amateur level of voice acting which becomes grating as the short goes on. Most character voices are one note, sounding monotonous at best and headache-inducingly difficult to listen to at worst. What comes across is a lack of faith in the writing, the actors performing their lines with far too much effort in an attempt to sound funny. The performers are more than likely not professionals, but unlike the art, this is tiring more than charming. The combination of a weak script and unconvincing vocal performances may have audiences reaching for a mute button faster than the cast intended.

Animation is a challenging art form to fully realise, especially so for amateur or indie projects. Having said this, Spirit Juice is not visually compelling. The animation is disappointingly limited, the characters move around weightlessly, and each scene is poorly staged. Perhaps the short could have attempted some more ambitious shot compositions, using the limitation of the restricted animations as a strength. Dialogue could have been improved using more shot variation, perhaps making use of shot-reverse shot in the bar scenes. The short takes place entirely from the same camera angle which becomes tiresome before long. For their next project, maybe the crew could look towards South Park which does well to vary the staging of each scene even with its simple art style.

What it has in Spirit, it lacks in Juice. Spirit Juice is clearly a passion project, and while that’s admirable, there will be little appeal for those unattached to the short. There’s clearly room for improvement, and I hope that the team behind Spirit Juice are more ambitious in what they try next.