Self-Portrait that acts as his YouTube profile picture
I am a disembodied head. I animate using a pen shoved in my neckhole. One day, science will be able to graft my head on to a tree, and I'll give up animation to focus on growing walnuts off of my body.
— Felix's channel description
Felix Colgrave (born 19 November 1992, according to The Other Wiki), formerly known as Master Aardvark is an Australian cartoonist and animator currently residing in Melbourne with his wife and child. He is known for the strange, surreal and frequently outright trippy animated shorts that he posts on Youtube, as well as for said films' high-quality, hand drawn frame-by-frame animation, especially considering that he does it all by himself. Wishing that his shorts remain available to everyone for free, Felix Colgrave set up a Patreon page
.
His work includes among other things :
- The Pigpen (2009): a grim story about pigs, misery and capitalism.
- "48 hours film fest entry": a little creature is set on a world by a creator.
- ''Honk' (2013): a homeless man in a park may or may not be what he seems.
- Man Spaghetti (2013): two combatants are tossed in an arena, then things get weird.
- The Elephant's Garden (2014): episodic fragments of life on a spherical, flying garden that is being pulled by three elephants.
- An official music video for Fever the Ghost's song Source.
- Double King (2017): perhaps his most well-known short. The eponomous Double King goes around committing regicides in a frantic search for more crowns to wear. Was showcased in GLITCH Productions' So exited for what's to come.
- Dry Run (2019): a short film made for Adult Swim's "Off the Air". It's about a Trolval in the modern day.
- Throat Notes (2021): An ode to Tasmanian Wildlife. Features frogs, all sorts of bugs, a very disgruntled human and a Possum sound designer and music composer.
- DONKS (2023): Various mass-produced objects are dumped in the ocean and sink at the bottom. Something finds them and seemingly brings them to life. Notable for being excessively trippy even by Colgrave's standards, and also his first dip into mainly 3D animation.
Tropes specific to a particular short are best kept to the short's specific page, assuming one exists.
Felix Colgrave's works provide examples of the following tropes:
- Deranged Animation: Early shorts had a sinister-to-outright-nightmarish atmosphere, while later shorts are more colourful and veer more into oddly calming environments or Surreal Humor.
- Eldritch Ocean Abyss: DONKS is set underneath one, where an amorphous black creature with glowing eyes and too many legs animates the ocean's trash.
- Indy Ploy: Colgrave's general approach to stories, see Writing by the Seat of Your Pants below.
- Organic Technology: The submarine from DONKS turns out to have a whale-like skeleton.
- "Shaggy Dog" Story: Honk, Dry Run, Double King, "48-hours film fest entry"… Colgrave admitted that he improvises most of his stories and does not consider an ending from the start.
- Surreal Horror : Especially prominent in earlier short, progressively less so as time went by.
- Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: In a Q&A, Felix Colgrave stated that his approach to animation can be summed up as "I doodle something, make it move, and if I like it I try to see where it leads me".
