Web Animation / The Walten Files

Step right up and enter your most repressed experiences and get ready to be amazed.

"You must be so confused about what you saw. Don't be scared, my little bunny. Answers will be given eventually, but don't try to solve this puzzle only with the pieces you have so far. This is only the beginning, for I am going to tell you a story of broken people. Beautiful people. He is so sorry about what he did to them, but there's nothing he can do. Remember that. Safety in pills, Sophie."

The Walten Files is an Analog Horror animated series created by Martin Walls. Similar to channels like Squimpus McGrimpus, it's inspired by Five Nights at Freddy's. However, it makes itself distinct from other series similar to it because it takes place in an alternate continuity with original characters and locations, and it uses a 2D animated art style instead of actual footage.

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The Walten Files provides examples of:

• Accidental Murder: In Bunnyfarm, it is revealed that Felix Kranken accidentally killed Jack’s children in a car crash while intoxicated. The next scene is a recorded message from Jack begging to see his children.
• Alternate Reality Game: The site "www.findjackwalten.com" seems to be directly related to the later episodes. By adding "/jennyletterson" to the end of the site name, there is a script of the dialogue between Jenny Letterson and Sophie Walten after seeing her dead family members as well as other employees at the end of Bunnyfarm.
  • Clicking on the "Contact Us Here" button opens a page called "help" (also found by typing "/missing" to the end of the site name), with a picture of a human covered by ripped up pages of deformed features to the left. The screen is then divided into black and white, with "did you forget about me?" in white text and obscured aside from the first word. It,s since been updated to be entirely black, except for the words "see you soon" to the left.
  • Typing "/rosemarywalten" brings you to a page called "a beautiful rose", containing Rosemary’s missing poster.
  • Typing in "/sophiewalten" brings you to a page that has a transcript of Jenny asking Sophie about her earliest memories and what she remembers about her parents.
  • After an update, adding "/investigation1" shows a picture of an interior inside the Walten family home, alongside a log from a detective named Derek Collins detailing how the investigation of Jack Walten's disappearance has been going...dating to 1977. And the page is titled "Log #785".
    • Another update changed it to a photo of a distorted and monochrome close-up of someone's face, with a text reading "but now god knows anything goes" underneath it.
  • if you type in "/rocketbunny", there comes what looks like an old camera recording of Rocket sitting in a chair listlessly, mouth opening and closing on loop.
• Ambiguously Gay: Strange as it is for a horror series, there are a few instances in which others have interpreted as being potential scenarios that feature canon same-sex couples; both from Word of God, such as Jenny and Sophie (although the episode doesn't explore or mention this subject, and they could just be friends), and also a moment involving the Horse Girl in the third episode, who Banny sees and promptly blushes Through a Face Full of Fur.
  • Eventually some characters got sexualities confirmed by Martin Walls, with Sophie being confirmed Bisexual and Banny as well as her human counterpart, Susan Woodings are both lesbians. It's speculated that Sophie's girlfriend Jenny is also a lesbian.
• Amnesiac Hero: Sophie Walten outright admits she doesn’t remember much of her childhood. This is because her unnamed but oft-mentioned pills, whatever they may be, make her almost completely unable to remember her childhood.
• Anachronism Stew: All over the place. Bon's Burgers was somehow founded before both Chuck E. Cheese and Showtime. The animation in the VHS tapes look less like animation from the 70s and more like the animation that would be common nowadays. The game seen in "BunnyFarm" looks quite a bit too advanced to have come out in 1982, featuring both cartoon graphics stills and full voice acting along with pixel graphics. While Laserdisc games existed at the time that would have supported voice acting and non-pixellated cartoon graphics, they couldn't be incorporated with those graphics until about 10 years after the game was in development.
• An Arm and a Leg: Rosemary's body was dismembered before being put into the Sha animatronic.
• Anti-Alcohol Aesop: The entire series carries a strong anti-drinking message, as Bunnyfarm reveals that the Bunny Smiles tragedies began due to the Plot Triggering Deaths of Jack Walten's kids, Edd and Molly, when Felix Kranken was driving them home from a school party while drunk and ended up crashing the car. This caused Felix and Jack to fall into depression and their friendship to break apart.
• Arc Words: "Beautiful" pops up often in the series, often in tandem with characters being stuffed into animatronics.
  • Relocate Project
    • The first use was in the Sha segment, after we learn what happened to Rosemary
      Sha: When she woke up, she was beautiful
      But on the inside...
      It felt like every single part of her body was bleeding
    • The second time refers to Ashley Parks.
      " Ashley is still there, but she's not screaming anymore, she saw something she wasn't supposed to see, and now she's beautiful, she's beautiful, she's beautiful, she's beau-"
  • It's said in Lucky You by an unknown narrator (most likely Bon) stating that he made the animatronics beautiful, even if it was an accident.
  • Bunnyfarm
    • It's used after the Hippo House segment in reference to Susan Woodings being stuffed into Banny
      Congratulations SOAPIE! You just made Susan beautiful!
    • Finally, we see Rosemary, as Sha, ask "Am I still beautiful to you, Sophie?"
• Art-Style Clash:
  • Human characters who appear throughout the series are usually depicted in one of two different ways, either appearing as realistic, black-and-white photographs of a person, or as a cartoonish, Raggedy Ann-esque version of themselves. This contrast is intentional; the first style is often reserved for older characters from the 1970s, and serves to distinguish them as influential key figures to the lore and backstory of the series. Meanwhile, the second, more innocent-looking style is frequently used for younger characters from around the 1980s, who merely stumble into the plot and have no idea what dangers await them.
  • The art style Edd and Molly appears with resembles that of children's drawings.
• Big Bad: "Bon", a mysterious entity that has possessed the Bon animatronic and is responsible for the deaths of the other employees in the surrounding area.
• Call-Back: In "Company Introductory Tape" The Showstoppers are introduced singing the song "The Sun Has Got His Hat On". In "Relocate Project", a more carnival-esque variant plays over Ashley's screams as she's killed by Bon.
• Christmas Episode: Boozoo's Ghosts is Yet Another Christmas Carol that goes horribly off-track.
• Composite Character: Bon and Bannie could be considered this to both Bonnie from Five Nights at Freddy's (both being animatronic rabbits), and Candy and Cindy from Five Nights at Candy's (a blue male animatronic who is the face of their company and a purple female animatronic as a stage partner).
• Cruel and Unusual Death: When someone dies in this series, it can be almost guarenteed that it won't be pretty.
  • Brian Stells seems to be missing both his eyes and one of his arms after Bon caught him.
  • Rosemary Walten was dismembered by Bon before being stuffed into the Sha animatronic.
  • Ashley Parks was stuffed into the Billy animatronic, and judging by her screams, it wasn't a pleasant experience. When Bon takes off the mask, we also see her eyeless and bloody face.
  • It's implied that Susan (the person possessing Banny) starved to death. Bunnyfarm makes it worse when we see her mutilated corpse as well.
    i am still alive
    but i can’t move
    and im having trouble breathing
    and my stomach feels weird
  • Charles (the man assumed to be possessing Boozoo) had his lips ripped off before being stuffed into the animatronic still alive and is mutilated to the point he can’t remember his actual face.
• Curiosity Killed the Cast: How Ashley is killed; she inspected the backrooms of the K-9 storage facility and played an old cassette tape listing 5 names before getting caught, killed, and stuffed into the Billy animatronic by Bon.
• Genre Shift: While still filled with surreal imagery, a good chunk of Cyber-Fun Tech shows more traditionally sequenced animated sequences featuring some of the murders in full and brief explorations of supernatural realms rather than the usual fragmentary obliqueness of analog horror.
• Gross-Up Close-Up: Any time a cute cartoon character meets a Cruel and Unusual Death, expect to see their remains drawn in unnervingly gruesome detail, often up close.
• Gruesome Goat: While technically not a goat, Sha the Sheep counts as this.
• Hair-Raising Hare: Bon & Bannie. Fitting as they're basically Bonnie expies. Rocket Bunny might be in the running as well.
• Halloween Episode: "The Mysterious House", a (supposedly) non-canon animated short that employs the usual Limited Animation and Stylistic Suck style of the series. It follows two new Funny Animal characters, Duckie and Tammy, who decide to enter the titular, decrepit house in the hopes of receiving some treats after an unfruitful round of trick-or-treating on Halloween night. It goes downhill from there.
• Hard Truth Aesop: Despite the shift to outright horror in its adaptation of A Christmas Carol, Boozoo's Ghosts largely preserves the original moral of the fable about trying to be as good as you can with the time you have.
• Haunted Technology: Even discounting the murderous killer robots stuffed with the remains of their victims, the instruction videos and the eponymous game in Bunnyfarm are frequently tampered with by the supernatural forces at play, glitching out in bizarre and horrifying ways.
• Internal Reveal: The deaths of Ashley Parks, Susan Woodings, and Edd, Molly, and Rosemary Walten are revealed to Sophie over the course of Bunnyfarm.
• Killer Robot: To be expected, as it's based off of Five Nights at Freddy's.
• Monster Clown: Billy the Clown's first proper appearance as an animatronic may be perhaps the creepiest out of the mascots, complete with a lifeless, Eyeless Face.
• Monster Munch: Facility Caretaker Brian Stells is this, we don't get to know much about him, and the only significant thing that happens to him is getting killed (with Bon, the Killer Robot blue rabbit animatronic thinking he was Sophie, the Walten family's eldest daughter who's taking amnesiacs due to her trauma from Bon's Burgers), leaving behind a nightmarish-looking corpse.
• Nightmare Face: Hooo... Let's count off the terrifying faces in this series, shall we?
  • First off is Jack Walten's constant appearances in each of the tapes. It would be perfectly fine if his face wasn't so distorted and creepy-looking in most of the times he's shown.
  • When Bon interrupts the footage in Company Introductory Tape, he appears eyeless at first, but then pitch-black human eyes begin to fade over his empty eyesockets before Tears of Blood start to pour out of them. It also doesn't really help that said-eyes are looking directly at the viewer, and that the background is completely white, which clashes with Bon's color palette.
  • Brian's corpse isn't exactly pleasant to look at, and the remake after Bunny Farm only makes it look even worse.
  • When Banny looks around for friends (customers) in Relocate Project, an image of Susan's distorted and warped face fades over Banny's. Banny continues to look around, the face appears again with a different expression. Finally, Banny looks at the viewer, and then the woman's face appears one last time, now with eyes and a mouth while a loud sound plays.
  • Bon's cartoonish render in Relocate Project has to be one of his creepiest rendition's yet, having realistic human teeth, a very wide grin, and freaky-looking eyes that move left to right, before finally looking at you.
• Non-Indicative Name: Subverted with the Hippo House level in Bunnyfarm, which has a title card depicting several pigs outside of a building. "Hippo House" actually refers to the home of Pete the Hippo, which the pigs wander into and must be retrieved from.
• Politically Correct History: Has shades of this. Banny, a character created for a show for children in the 80’s, is lesbian (ambiguously), while many characters like Susan, Sophie and Jenny are WLW and seem to have no issues being open about it.
• Scream Discretion Shot: We don't see how Ashley dies, but judging by her screams, it wasn't a pleasant experience.
• Shout-Out:
  • Ignorance and Want share the names of the children who accompany the Ghost of Christmas Present in A Christmas Carol.
  • The news report from Spectacle was broadcasted on the Local 57 channel.
• Soundtrack Dissonance:
  • Tammy's discovery of the corpses of the Pumpkin Rabbit's victims is set to a very old recording of "The Streets of Cairo".
  • The Season 1 trailer is set to "Way Back Home" by Bob Crosby, even as the content in the video starts taking a nosedive straight into hell.
  • Ashley's death is accompanied by cheerful carnival-esque music.
• Stylistic Suck:
  • The show has a very, very budget indie-animation type style which shifts between crudely drawn children's paintings and stylized 1960s-esque paperdolls.
  • The BunnyFarm video game would have been a technological marvel in the 1970s with voiced cutscenes, large maps, and a multitude of mini-games. Being haunted aside, it is also clearly straining under the weight of all of the above with the limited computing ability of the time period.
• Synthetic Voice Actor: A lot of the dialogue in the tapes is done using text to speech software, which convincingly sounds like actual people given the audio quality.
• Unperson: This seems to be what's happening to Jack Walten in the second, with him being cut from the founders photo while receiving absolutely no mention in advertising, only popping up as an abnormality.
• Wham Shot: Cybertech Fun's sonar footage of Bon's possession. It was assumed for much of the story that Jack Walten was the one possessing Bon, and he had gone insane from the combined grief and agony after being killed to cover up Felix's manslaughter via DUI. However, not only is Jack alive - albeit starting to become sparse in his public appearances as he tries to track down Felix - when Bon becomes hostile, but whatever's controlling the animatronic may not have ever been human to start with,.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • The father of 3 children mysteriously goes missing, and when his wife goes searching for him she ends up being killed, leaving the 3 children without parents, with the killer hunting down at least one of those children. Time will tell if Jack's other 2 children will be featured in future installments.
  • "The Mysterious House" has a simple, mundane one: children disappearing on Halloween, abducted and murdered by serial killers who lure them in with candy. It practically works as a PSA.

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