Creator / David Firth

Beware the friendly stranger.

Influences: Chris Morris, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Adam and Joe, David Lynch, Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Guided by Voices, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Neutral Milk Hotel

David John Firth (born 23 January 1983) is an English animator and writer, who got his start as an animator on Newgrounds with the use of Adobe Flash. Since the demise of Flash, David moved to After Effects. Firth is best known for his surreal webseries Salad Fingers, alongside Burnt Face Man.

On the side he's also a musician, playing a mixture of indie, folk and psychedelic rock in the band Grape Digging Sharon Fruits, playing harder, Post-Rock-ish material as I'm the Manager, or releasing electronic and lo-fi solo material under the handles Locust Toybox and Stegosaurus Trap respectively. Firth also directed the music video for Flying Lotus' single "Ready Err Not," which premiered on Adult Swim in Halloween 2014.

To cut a long story short, Firth's work is really, really, weird.

Works:

• A Black And White Cartoon
• Burnt Face Man
• Devvo
• Drillbithead
• Hell (a stop motion collaboration with two other animators)
• Jerry Jackson
• Not Stanley
• Panathinaikos Bear
• Sock (an experimental series inspired by dreams)
• Salad Fingers
• Spoilsbury Toast Boy
• The World Within a Sock
• The News Hasn't Happened Yet
• Crooked Rot
• Cream
• Plastic Hand

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Tropes:

• Black Comedy: A common element from the large majority of his work. Sometimes alternated with elements of Surreal Humor and Surreal Horror.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: The entire twist of Cream is that a group of these ruined everything for everybody. The titular Cream is so helpful and rejuvenating that nearly all problems, including bodily defects, world hunger, poverty, deforestation, and running out of Cream itself, have been cured with no ill effects. However, because this made billionaires obsolete, the rich gathered up to create a campaign denouncing Cream and played into every vulnerability imaginable to get the public to swear off of it altogether. After things went back to normal, they redressed a perfectly normal cream as its healthier successor product and sold it to make more money.
• Crapsack World: The world of Salad Fingers and Spoilsbury Toast Boy is dark, bleak and hopeless.
• Darker and Edgier: Spoilsbury Toast Boy is easily his darkest work, being very bleak and almost without humor. Salad Fingers slowly became Darker and Edgier with each passing episode.
• Hilariously Abusive Childhood: In A Short Cartoon About Time, an abusive, alcholic mother forces her son to sell all of his time to fund her habit, turning him into a decrepit old man.
  Son: But moooom! I don't want to sell more of my time!
  Mother: You'll do as I FOKKING tell you!
• Horror Comedy: Both Salad Fingers and Spoilsbury Toast Boy alternate horror with some Black Comedy elements. His Sock series also alternates humor and horror as well.
• Insane Troll Logic: Some of his works are fueled by this trope.
• Insistent Terminology: Not Stanley may have killed around 210 people, but he doesn’t think of himself as a serial killer, as those kills were one-offs and not a series.
• Limited Animation: Notable during his early days when using Flash. This began to disappear over time, espcially when Firth began using After Effects.
• Mind Screw: His production has a habit of being quite puzzling.
• No Indoor Voice: In Not Stanley.
• Oop North: Firth was born in Doncaster and currently based in Leeds.
• Promoted Fanboy: Firth is a fan of Warp Records artists like Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada and, most notably, Flying Lotus. He has, through the reputation he garnered for himself via Salad Fingers, ended up collabing with FlyLo several times and even has a writing credit on Flying Lotus's film "Kuso".
• Silly Walk: The main character in Not Stanley walks rather weirdly.
• Simple-Minded Wisdom: Not Stanley tends to veer between "Nonsequitor stand up" and "reflections on the world and society" within the same sentence.
• Surreal Humor / Surreal Horror: His body of work fluxes wildly between the two.
• Take That!:
  • In his "Music Guess 2009" short, David Firth takes a stab at the music industry and the Lowest Common Denominator they're aiming for.
  • The News Hasn't Happened Yet is essentially one big "Take That!" towards the 24-hour news networks as well as many independent commentators for creating an indecipherable information flow by constantly contradicting each other, contradicting themselves, or just outright deceiving their viewers for political or financial gain.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: Several of his characters, such as Salad Fingers and Spoilsbury Toast Boy, appear to be insane or actively hallucinating.
• Toilet Humor: The short "The Men From Up The Stairs" is a surreal, slightly satirical take on this.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: The titular Cream is capable of doing everything in its power to make life better for everyone that uses it; to the point that it all but renders money and the acquisition of wealth completely obsolete. A group of billionaires decide to launch a campaign to inflame the public into hating Cream just so they could get rid of the godlike stuff and sell a cheaper knockoff brand that can only partially replenish skin just to remain in power.
• Wham Line: Cream at first looks like a positive yet weird video about how one product can save the world. But then, the second this line is said, the short's true message rears its head.
  News Reporter: Cream could bring an end to all war, famine, and suffering. Rendering money essentially, obsolete.
• World-Healing Wave: Cream can essentially do anything, from bringing life to a barren desert, cleaning up polluted waters, all the way up to reviving the dead.

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