Web Animation / Nigel and Marmalade

Our heroes.

He's Nigel the tiny wizard
Riding atop his dog/horse steed
He's Nigel the tiny wizard
He'll help anyone in need

— The first short

Nigel and Marmalade is a surreal animated comedy web series created by Tom Bates. It stars a small yellow wizard named Nigel and his dog/horse companion, Marmalade. They travel the land righting wrongs and helping those in need, but more often than not, the duo's heroism tends to carry adverse side effects.

The first short was uploaded on January 2nd, 2023. The series can be viewed on YouTube.

Spoilers are unmarked due to the episodes' short length

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Nigel and Marmalade provides examples of:

• Animate Body Parts: In one short, Nigel and Marmalade have a customer for their potions who wants flesh-dissolving acid to kill his sentient right hand because he finds it annoying. Nigel frees the hand and said hand wants to go stabbing afterwards.
• Animate Inanimate Object: Many sentient objects are seen throughout the series, from apples to popcorn to tree stumps.
• Bad Boss: The hot air balloon taxi company doesn't allow its chauffeurs to leave their vehicles at any time or for any reason, even if they permanently stayed in it for 35 years.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: The series basically runs on this trope.
• Big Eater: The easiest way to distract Nigel from the consequences of the disaster du jour is to invoke food.
• Body Horror: Occasionally.
  • The first time he tries following the recipe from Cooking with Portals, Nigel gets both eyes swollen grotesquely by the winds dragging him into Hell.
  • When trying to save Trim Lipply, Nigel tries merging himself and Marmalade into a bird. He only succeeds in merging both into a bird-shaped lump of meat.
• Bottomless Pits: The bottomless ice gorge in the deadly mountains, that people will occasionally try to cross on a stone bridge guarded by a troll, to go to the hamburger van parked on the other side. According to Marmalade, it's literally a bottomless pit.
• Bring My Brown Pants: In one short, Marmalade does this after noticing that the flesh table he and Nigel are riding is approaching a cliff. Never mind his apparent lack of pants.
  Marmalade: I'm currently wetting myself.
• Brits Love Tea: Patricia is easily the character who concentrates the most of clichés about English people. And the most prominent is her love for a "lovely cuppa".
• Cast of Snowflakes: Other than Nigel, Marmalade and occasionally Patricia, there are no recurring characters, and those that appear are impressively varied.
• Curse Cut Short: In one short, where Nigel and Marmalade help a sentient apple get revenge on the horse that tried to eat it, the apple does this when it realizes it's about to be eaten by said horse.
  Apple: Oh, fu— [CHOMP]
• Disproportionate Retribution: A short revolved around a hobbit who was pilloried, literally, for the horrible crime of rubbing its greasy forehead on a shop's windows.
• The Dividual: Both Nigel and Marmalade are always seen together, never going solo.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Nigel used to agonize a bit over the disasters he caused. He's become pretty desensitized since.
• Emergency Transformation: One of Nigel's specialties. It would probably work better if he were capable of reversing or even lessen it, given he tends to heavily overshoot whatever change he was going for.
• Evil Tastes Good: The host of Cooking with Portals apparently believes so, since his recipes seem to be based on opening portals to Hell and allowing the heat to cook the food.
• Feathered Fiend: Downplayed; every bird is a Jerkass with teeth, eager to laugh at other's misery and call them bastards. This is a Running Gag across the series. The Vulture pecking a zombie is an exception.
• Fishing for Sole: When they go fishing in a pond, Nigel catches a tyre and Marmalade an arm, which were being used by the Inventor Fish for his contraption in order to get out.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: Well, since every episode lasts one minute or less, each occurrence of foreshadowing technically counts. However one is particularly distinguishable: when Nigel and Marmelade help Kevin the fox out of a trap, he gladly goes away without thanking them. Usually, when they help someone and this person is happy, they thank them. Immediately after, the villager who set the trap comes back, and reveals that Kevin is actually a demonic fox, and a jerk.
• Foil: Nigel is unintelligible to the audience, but exhibits emotion, whilst Marmalade is intelligible but has a perpetual neutral expression.
• Formula-Breaking Episode: Usually, besides some cameos of previous characters and Continuity Nod, each episode is disconnected from the others. However, the episode published on the 19th of March 2024 starts with Nigel and Marmalade being locked in a dungeon, a direct consequence of stealing a wizard's hat in the previous episode published earlier that month.
• Gentleman Thief: Played with Patricia, who's a shameless thief and fancier of the finer things, but is far more willing to kill than other examples of this trope.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Qwimble Norris, a flesh disk, gets trapped in the well that serves as the only entrance or exit of the town's hottest nightclub. Nigel gives him a push further down, finally letting him enter the club... which is full of corpses. It turns out he was stuck in there, by his own estimation, for five or six decades, trapping everyone inside. When he keeps chumming up with the dead patrons, Nigel asks Marmalade if Qwimble has gone insane. Marmalade confirms it.
• Hero with an F in Good: Nigel. Whenever someone gives him a request, he does his absolute best to fulfil it. Unfortunately, his ability to think about the consequences of the wish leads to exaggerated forms of the wish in ways that invariably backfire on the wisher. To be fair to Nigel, though, a good amount of the wishers don't think about said consequences either.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • A rare heroic case with Nigel. He is well-intentioned and tries to use his powers for good. But it usually ends up poorly for the people he tries to help. And yes, that includes him when, for some reason, he casts his own spell on himself or on his house. Repeatedly.
  • A more traditional villain case with the Prank Wizard. He uses a magic balloon to prank Marmalade and sends him into the sky, not caring about the danger of the situation. So, in return, in one of the few occurrences where Nigel actually does magic exactly how he wants, he turns the Prank Wizard into a balloon himself to go save Marmalade, and that also came with the side effect of the Prank Wizard exploding.
• Ignored Epiphany: Nobody ever listens to Marmalade's advice to take some time to deal with their problems and work out what they really want, instead immediately demanding Nigel use his magic to provide a quick fix. Long story short, even if Nigel has the best intentions, this never works.
• Intelligible Unintelligible: Nigel speaks in a strange squeaky voice which the audience can only understand by reading the subtitles, but the other characters understand him just fine.
• Liquid Assets: In one episode, a goblin woman requests Nigel's help with her boyfriend, who has his hunkiness sucked by a Jam Jar of Insanity, reducing him to a shrivelled wreck. Nigel opens the Jar and confirms it's in there, but pulling it out too early accidentally infuses it into the nearby Nutella jar, creating an animated, musclebound entity. The girlfriend ends up running away with the Nutella.
• Master of None: Nigel can do anything with his magic, but it often backfires horribly. The only consistent magic Nigel can do on people without harming anyone is muscle magic (such as using it on Clump, and the cockney Hobbit that rubbed his face on a window) and Telekinesis.
• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: Almost every episode of the series has Nigel and Marmalade ultimately doing more harm than good in an attempt to help someone in need. For example, in this short, Nigel gives a sentient tree stump feet so it can escape a goblin that plans to destroy it, but the stump turns out to be evil. And in this one, Nigel makes a bog witch's head smooth so she'll stop rubbing everyone else's heads out of jealousy, but he ends up accidentally removing part of her brain in the process and the witch continues rubbing their heads anyway. The list goes on.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Possibly. Marmalade is described as a "dog/horse", but it's unclear whether that means he's part dog and part horse, or that he is either a dog or a horse and it's unclear as to which.
• Mundane Utility: "Cooking With Portals" involves using portals to the underworld to bake food as if they were ovens.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Proving they don't need Nigel's magic to do this, Nigel and Marmalade try to defuse a duel between Patricia and a cowboy by talking with him and giving him a pep talk. They succeed... just in time for Patricia to work out how her gun works and headshot the cowboy.
• Our Zombies Are Different: Besides the fact he is rotting and attracts vultures, the Undead Cyclist still behaves as a normal human being. It is implied that he isn't a unique case.
• Perpetual Expression: Marmalade's face is always in a neutral expression.
• Poke the Poodle: Many of the antagonists that Nigel and Marmalade encounter have that trait, such as a cockney hobbit committing crimes in a convenience store; said crimes included slapping the crisps and throwing slices of ham at an old woman, which Marmalade lampshades.
• A Rare Sentence: Throughout the series, the situations are so bizarre that everything the people say about them sounds like cobbled-up nonsense.
• Reckless Gun Usage:
  • Trim Lipply, a tiny blue person, starts an adventure by firing "the Adventurer's Pistol" into the air. This kills a bird, and her irate husband swoops down to fling Trim from above. When saved by Nigel and Marmalade, Trim celebrates the end of his adventure by firing the Adventurer's Pistol into the air again. This kills the other bird.
  • Patricia enters a duel with the cowboy she insulted by flicking his bulbous Adam's apple. She is unfamiliar with the gun, but as the cowboy gets distracted by talking with Nigel and Marmalade, Patricia works out how to fire it and ventilates the cowboy's head. To be fair, the cowboy did manage to shoot once but missed.
• Sapient Eat Sapient: Apparently, sentience is a powerful help to better the taste of something.
  • Colonel Kernel's popcorn is the most delicious in the world, precisely because it is sentient.
  • This gets deconstructed by the sausages from the Sausage Shack, which get taken away from the sausage delivery truck by a Sack because they're sapient and are brought to the Sausage King to form an army. Said sausages rallied against the Shack, and the person running the stand said they don't like being eaten and that the one in the advert was "a paid sausage actor".
  • The Duke eats the most delicious cakes in the world on a daily basis, and it absolutely doesn't bother him to eat a sentient cake able to talk. Nigel and Marmalade neither, but they stopped when they realized that cutting the cake hurt it badly.
• Sapient Steed: Nigel rides on Marmalade's back as Marmalade's a dog/horse, and Marmalade can talk to anybody.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Just about everyone, barring the titular duo, has really colourful vocabulary.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Graham, who's famous for having the biggest mouth, feels he has to strangle a pelican to death to protect his "title", feeling he can't compete.
• Super-Strength: Muscle magic, when it's done right.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Almost systematically, such as Nigel creating a barricade with no door around a lake for a guardian frog and the latter's mate comes back for shopping and has no way to get in.
  • Also, happens sometimes even without Nigel's intervention. Colonel Kernel's emporium has had no other clients than Nigel and Marmalade for several years because it is located at the top of a mountain, Trim Lipply shoots two birds dead because he doesn't aim before firing his gun, despite Marmalade trying to avoid this, the evil tree stump and Kevin the demonic fox have villagers actively trying to trap and kill them for being dangerous jerks, or the beaver with flaccid teeth, which he considers his "secret shame", accidentally divulgating it to a bird, a sentient tree and Nigel and Marmalade, because he is singing about it out loud.
• Talking Animal: Marmalade is a talking dog/horse. Talking birds are also regularly seen in the series, and often have potty mouths. Some other animals can speak too.
• That Makes Me Feel Angry: Marmalade's face and voice are both completely neutral 24/7, so when he has to express an emotion, he plainly states how he's feeling. One time, he said that he was in a panic attack in that tone when a prank witch pranked him with a balloon.
• Tim Taylor Technology: The Inventor Fish wants to leave his pond in a water-powered contraption, but Nigel and Marmalade accidentally tore out key components, so Nigel uses his magic to boost the device. In fact, he overpowers it to the point it and its builder rocket off into the horizon, where they detonate in a blast.
• Tom the Dark Lord: Christopher: God of Diseases.
• Toxic Friend Influence: Patricia convinces Nigel to steal a hat from a wizard, which gets Nigel and Marmalade to be prosecuted under hat law.
• Trademark Favorite Food:
  • Nigel is particularly fond of pop-corns to the point that he's excited about going to a popcorn festival and travels with Marmalade up a mountain to get to a popcorn store located near the peak.
  • Marmalade is fond of chocolate and when he falls into a vat of chocolate, he says that he loves it.
  • Patricia always appears drinking tea or planning to.
• [Trope Name]: Combined with Saying Sound Effects Out Loud. In one instance, the sausage shack owner says "Boo hoo! Sad noises!" when they don't have the sentient sausages for their business. Another incidence is when Marmalade is sleeping and says "Snore. Sleeping noises".

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