The Disney's No.1 Anti-fan: Adult Swim

Does animation have to be beautiful? Disney, DreamWorks, Studio Ghibli—these top animation studios have established industry benchmarks for animators worldwide. However, some viewers (including myself as the No.1 Hayao Miyazaki fan) gradually experience fatigue from polished aesthetics. We grew up influenced by "beautiful" animation, but as we truly mature, we discover that beyond "beauty," there are many different—even opposite—styles that lack expression. Today, I want to start with Common Side Effects to discuss the unconventional Adult Swim with you.

Hello Peliplaters!

The story premise of Common Side Effects (2024) is enticing: a down-and-out fungus expert, Marshall, discovers the world's most powerful medicine—a blue mushroom that can cure almost any disease or injury—in an uninhabited jungle. He has no intention of keeping it for himself; instead, he wants everyone in the world to have free access to this mushroom. However, this discovery quickly draws the attention of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and international pharmaceutical corporations...

Does this plot sound familiar? Some viewers might be immediately reminded of the news from years ago about an inventor who claimed to have developed a way to use water instead of gasoline as fuel, only to mysteriously die shortly after announcing his invention.

How can an ant stand up to an elephant? Marshall doesn't look like a knowledgeable expert at all, and we certainly can't associate him with the physically fit special agents from action films. Yet from another perspective, his focused gaze, unkempt face, and head that's broken into irregular building blocks all emphasize his determination. Deepening the audience's understanding of a character through specific actions rather than appearance not only allows viewers to experience a sense of absurd theatricality but also helps creators shape more diverse characters.

Traditional professionalism often constrains imagination. In conventional action films, DEA agents are depicted with immaculate appearances and a perpetually serious demeanor—they represent justice and law, after all, and apprehending criminals is serious business. Common Side Effects, however, presents Agent Copano and his partner Harrington in a refreshingly different light. While they maintain their professional composure during missions, they also dance to vintage car music while surveilling suspects and talk whimsically about whether "celery is a cousin or sibling to carrots" during investigations. These moments disrupt the expected "fluidity" of traditional narrative rhythm and free the audience's imagination: perhaps the world isn't exactly as we've been conditioned to perceive it.

If you find yourself appreciating the absurdist style of Common Side Effects, you might enjoy exploring Smiling Friends—another Adult Swim production that pushes boundaries even further, offering an experience roughly ten times more outlandish.

Smiling Friends has aired two seasons with a viewer-friendly runtime for each episode. There's 17 episodes in total from both seasons, with each episode being an 11-minute standalone story. These stories follow Charlie and Pim's work as salespeople at Smiling Friends, a company dedicated to bringing joy and happiness to clients. While this premise sounds fairytale-like, none of their cases actually involve fairytales; instead, they tackle seemingly impossible situations that even God would find challenging to resolve.

For example, in the first episode, Charlie and Pim are dispatched by their boss to help Desmond, a suicidal man. Throughout their interaction, Desmond holds a gun to his head, threatening Charlie and Pim. He claims he'll only put the gun down if they make him happy. The eternally optimistic Pim tries various approaches to cheer him up, including bringing Desmond on a trip to an amusement park, but these attempts are ultimately defeated by Desmond's nihilism, which causes Pim to spiral into an existential crisis. The story takes an unexpected turn: when Pim and Charlie bring Desmond back to their office, they discover it's infested with bugs called "Bliblies." After Desmond shoots one of these bugs, he suddenly regains a sense of purpose, prompting Pim to encourage him to start a pest control company.

Compared to Desmond, Charlie and Pim are like two inexperienced children. Did they really make a critical impact on Desmond? Not really. Desmond ultimately saved himself, while they seem more like pitiable stepping stones who sacrificed themselves for his benefit. In this seemingly futile and sad situation, what truly moves the audience isn't Desmond, but rather Charlie and Pim's continuous reactions to Desmond's erratic behavior. Desmond, by comparison, behaves like a child constantly seeking attention from adults. In real life, ineffective problem-solving approaches often far outnumber effective ones, yet those seemingly useless methods frequently become the foundation for reaching the final solution. If Charlie and Pim had stopped caring about Desmond, he would never have reached his conclusion.

Similarly, in Common Side Effects, what truly drives the plot forward is Marshall's motivation to cure all diseases, despite his goal sounding like a fantasy. This is precisely the charm of Adult Swim: the animated characters' actions carry far more significance than their symbolic meaning. After all, emotions conveyed through actions are much more authentic than empty forms. Of course, their creative team doesn't reject refined animation production—in fact, in Common Side Effects, the hallucinations that characters experience after consuming the blue mushroom are quite beautiful.