In Defense of Skibidi Toilet

While we plug away at Nail House, I am sometimes motivated to write about stuff I'm seeing in the world of film (or in this case - online video). So this isn't a production update, but just a thing I've been thinking about:

Obsolescence is inevitable.

Lately, I’ve detected a stubborn resistance to this inevitability from my own cohort, the Elder Millennial. I think we Milennials are more inclined to tighten our grip around our fading cultural relevance because there’s a sense of having been there first. We remember 56k modems and what the Internet looked like at its dawn. We booted Encarta from CD-ROM caddies. We are the last generation to remember the pre-cyberspace, pre-smart phone world, so what do you mean we’re not a big deal on the internet anymore!?

In our role as out of touch old people, when we encounter artifacts from a new generation’s early internet experience, our first reaction is horror and disgust (as all out of touch old people do in this situation). In some respects, that's what Skibidi Toilet is - a thing for Gen Alpha/Young Gen Z to watch, share, and enjoy and for us Millennials to dismiss.

We, too, had our early viral internet videos that drew similar reactions from our elders. In 5th grade, I heard there was a video, called “The Spirit of Christmas” that was a new kind of construction paper stop motion animation I hadn’t quite seen before.

The Spirit of Christmas

And what’s more - it was profane, full of swearing and sacrilege. But it was a 50-megabyte download, i.e. out of immediate reach for all of us with our slow internet at home. On my school’s internet, it was attainable by 8:00 AM, which gave me and a small group of nerdy friends a 10-minute window before classes started to watch it (I would later get in trouble for downloading it). That cartoon, made by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, was the basis for South Park.

There were others. Many memorable videos/cartoons came from early Flash animation on Newgrounds (low brow) and Homestar Runner (highbrow). Skibidi Toilet might be seen as very similar to those early Flash offerings - an individualistic work of art that, through the wafting eddies of internet updrafts, caught the wind just right, and is plainly recognizable as a formative moment for a chunk of an entire generation’s childhood, just like the Xiao Xiao stick figure fight animations, or the G.I. Joe PSA’s, or Happy Tree Friends, or Strongbad Email was for us.

Xiao Xiao Stick Fights. This was John Wick before John Wick.

Alexey Gerasimov, the Russian kid who made Skibidi Toilet, is 27. Go through his YouTube channel, sort by Oldest, and see not some one-off lucky viral video, but a pedigree of devotion to a craft. He’s been uploading videos made in Source Filmmaker for seven years. These videos weren’t always successful either. This kid was putting in the hours, irrespective of the dopaminergic rewards of internet fame.

Let me pitch the series to you. Skibidi Toilet is a serialized first-person kaiju action series that tells the story, through snippets of battles and operations on the ground, of a war between toilets with heads coming out of them and humanoids. The series is released in short episodes, and there have been people who have gone to the trouble of combining them so you don't have to hunt. If you're looking to watch, then here is one such video compilation.

The first few videos are YouTube Poops. For those unfamiliar, YouTube Poop is representative of a whole subgenre of YouTube proto-brain rot content, essentially an obnoxiously loud video mashup form (the audio being mega distorted is played as emphasis and a joke). In the first episode of Skibidi Toilet, a first-person camera approaches a distorted Half-Life 2 model head coming out of a toilet while a snippet of a foreign techno hit plays. (We had one too. Ours was “My-yah heee!” Here it’s "Skibidi.")

Most of the people who dismiss this series don't get much farther than this (most news articles about Skibidi Toilet and the recent Michael Bay production company acquisition show screenshots from the first few episodes). This isn't a work with a clean, coherent beginning. It starts as kind of a joke. But as Gerasimov continues to explore the visual space with these Source Filmmaker assets, threads of a narrative emerge. There’s an antagonist group (toilets with heads coming out of them) and a protagonist (our point of view, which seems to be robots with surveillance camera heads wearing suits). Yes, it's simplistic, broad, and juvenile, but one of the most popular animes of the last decade has been Chainsaw Man, which is about a teenager with a chainsaw for a head (which you should definitely watch).

Gerasimov is a 3D modeler, animator, but most importantly, a filmmaker at heart. You start to see a nascent filmmaking language emerge in how, episode by episode, he stages increasingly long one-take narrative sequences. The action blocking flows naturally, and you feel it improve as time goes on. You also marvel at how dialogue-free it is - and how you’re learning about the rules of the world and the shape of the conflict just by observing drama unfold before you. The Surveillance Cameras have, amongst them, kaiju titans, their kind but bigger, behemoths who are stronger because they’re bigger. I'm reminded a little bit of how powerful my Lego starships were, and how it was childish how the bigger ones were more powerful, but also they just intuitively felt that way?

Kaiju Titans, exhibiting some pretty sophisticated rigging and animation to express their scale and weight

As the episodes progress, the march of a war is laid before you. You start to understand the rules of this sci-fi universe just from found footage snippets, and the drama starts to feel like a wrestling storyline playing out the way characters are maneuvered around like chess pieces to tell a story. The feeling of wrestling storytelling was what made me beg Anthony to watch the series. He had the same experience I did - a moment when a Surveillance Camera hero (who wields TWO plungers) appears during the climax of a fight caused both of us to exclaim aloud, “Oh SHIT!”

I cannot think of the last time a mainstream superhero movie had a genuine "Oh Shit!" moment for me. RRR did last year, and as I’ve grown older and my love for movies gets deeper, I've started to appreciate any media that can give me that feeling. Simple drama played for maximum emotional effect. And again - this is all done by one guy. Part 77 just came out two weeks ago and sits at 25 million views.

If a lone 3D animator spinning up a whole cinematic universe sounds familiar, you might be thinking of when Kane Pixels did the same thing with his Backrooms short films using Blender to achieve lo-fi photorealism. Or in a related field, maybe what Zeekerss did with the indy game Lethal Company.

To me, Skibidi Toilet represents a specific evolution of filmmaking itself. The tools got better and more accessible to artists earlier and earlier. Kids are learning to build rudimentary things in Roblox, Blender, Unity, and Source Filmmaker (not surprisingly, all free to access). They’re answering their questions by learning from YouTube tutorials. They are far more technically skilled than any of us were at that age. I see this phenomenon emerging everywhere. Increasingly, those who have the creative drive to just do the thing, regardless of views or likes, eventually acquire the skills to make something that does get a lot of views or likes.

The new filmmaking is coming from a flood of creative individuals and small groups trying to build entertainment for a global audience, and who have a large amount of experience and familiarity with the tools at hand. It is comforting to see that a new generation of creatives self-motivate and gravitate to these various forms of filmic expression.

I wonder how different I would be as a filmmaker if I could have started as early as this new generation has, with learning resources broadly and easily accessible. But alas, time marches onward. My generation of filmmaker competes now with a different kind of filmic entertainment. This stuff, driven by and distributed through the internet, won’t replace movies and narratives, of course, and is also subject to the whims of the corporate entities that control the levers of algorithmic timelines (a topic that warrants a whole other conversation).

But webseries like Backrooms or Skibidi Toilet, or Tik Tok micro comedy sketches, or Instagram "slow cinema" creative process short films are another flavor of our art form. In retrospect, didn’t the painters change how they painted when the photograph was invented? How will narrative filmmaking shift to accommodate these strange new kinds of entertainment?

Or to ask another, more immediate question - as a filmmaker, how can we make sure our movies hit at least as hard as Skibidi Toilet does?

-fw

ps. If you're reading this post from a link, this Patreon is documenting the creation of our next feature film project Nail House, an action comedy in the style of our old YouTube videos. We've recently started fight designing with our action director Yung Lee (Kingsman, Shang Chi). Check out the Patreon to learn more!