Fork and Batter get Worser: Final Animation
Fork and Batter get Worser: the Creation from Lin W on Vimeo.
There’s a time-honored tradition of Internet recipes I find myself needing to replicate: telling a detailed story about its existence before getting into the meat of documentation. Just as a writer has to describe their inspiration for gingerbread spice cookies, I must describe how Fork and Batter get Worser came into existence.
My mind is a repository for the cartoons I watched everyday after school. As long as I’ve seen part of a show, its contents, visuals, and tone get filed away into my mental file cabinet. The snappy humor of late 2000s shows such as The Marvelous Misdaventures of Flapjack or Chowder particularly stuck to me- when given the space to create my own animation, their structures became inspiration; with such limited time to make the work I knew comedy could strike a perfect balance between visuals and story. Another moment of Western television also came to mind: SpongeBob SquarePants, season 3, episode 44a, Nasty Patty. This episode features SpongeBob and Mr. Krabs thinking they had killed a food inspector and rushing to hide evidence of their crime. Immediately after recalling this segment, I could only think of one thing- what if the two wacky characters actually killed someone? And, most crucially, what if they decided to be fine with it?
Combining food, sweet visuals, and explosive situational comedy in my cranial stand mixer led to the concept behind Fork and Batter: two bakers make their pastries so bad, any customer who dares eat one explodes. In their panic, the girls cover up the crime. Floors are scraped, cameras are broken, bodies are dumped. However, when a new customer walks in completely unaware of what just happened, the two realize that as long as they keep getting paid… wouldn’t it be alright to let the deaths keep happening? The short acts as both a standalone piece of work and the first episode of a concept that stretches for episodes, exploring what happens after they make this connection.
The visual and tonal languages of the short mirror both standardized sitcom television and indie animation shorts. Rough animated lines, a loose relationship with reference, and a laid-back sense of frenzy feel like the one-man projects that end up viral on YouTube; the fun colors, dialogue, and exaggerated facial expressions fit right in with Adult Swim’s lineup. In some way, its the exact blend between my sources of inspiration and independent thought process. In others, I feel like the work says something that I didn’t plan for in its original vision. My own experiences studying criminology have bled heavily into my breadth, along with views of technological saturation into art. Perhaps Fork and Batter has morphed into something that speaks past ideas of intent (in exploding people) and security (of putting cameras up everywhere in your bakery, then needing to smash them up) that purposefully came about. In a way, that’s the beauty of animation- you never know what will happen. I doubt the creators of Chowder or Nasty Patty anticipated for a 21-year-old college student to take their works as inspiration for a short that’s half sociology and half food puns. I hope that my work can do the same to someone, added to their own visual library and pulled up later when it’s time for them to cook up something fresh.
