Sick and weird animations are to the Internet as jazz is to America: one of its truly original and great art forms. A lot has changed from the days of flash-animated shorts hosted on Newgrounds to our current era of YouTube stars though, and David Firth has been witness to every change of the landscape. Producing work since 1998, the celebrated creator of the Salad Fingers series has made a career off his dark, demented creations, and with Cream he produces his first piece completely funded by his fans.

Ambitious in scope, Cream imagines a ridiculous premise—a new product arrives that fixes pretty much everything. Whether you want to clear your face of blemishes, or improve yourself physically and mentally to a zenith of absolute perfection, subsequently evolving into a being of pure light energy…then knock yourself out, because “Cream” will do the trick. 

The ramifications of such a creation are fun to toss around, and Firth spends a good chunk of the film just hilariously riffing on the potential applications. Employing a simplistic layer-based animation style familiar to fans of Cyriak, and yet undeniably polished, Firth not-so-subtly skewers societal attitudes towards beauty, success, and sanctimonious PC causes throughout the film, though ultimately weighing in on the side of “Cream” being a tremendous force for good. Of course, this is not an acceptable outcome for our corporate overlords, whom, driven by the profit-potential of human immiseration, marshal their considerable powers to destroy the product. 

While capitalist elites are a familiar bogey-man, like everything in life nowadays it’s hard not to look at Cream through a political lens and be disturbed. Not knowing Firth’s personal politics, it is nonetheless reasonable to assume that chunks of his large fanbase are the same type of conspiracy-theorist, men’s rights movement activists that produce Pepe-memes and have come to be termed in the U.S. as the “alt-right”. The contours of their philosophy are in Cream, supposing that we can right the ills of society if only we could fight back against the powerful cabals that control finance and the media for their own benefit. 

Perhaps it is wrong to read so deeply into what is a deeply irreverent and silly film, but the creation of the film is illuminating as well in this regard. Cream is the first film produced through Firth’s new Patreon account, where already over 1000 fans have pledged money to creation of new work. In justifying to his fanbase the new funding scheme, Firth decries changes at YouTube (where he has a healthy 780k followers) as making the monetization of his work difficult. Blaming low ad rates, and a desire by the platform to “clean up” mature content that might cause advertisers to balk, Firth has turned to the young fan-supported platform which takes the Kickstarter model but employs it toward the ongoing production of a creator’s work rather than one-off projects. We’ve been seeing a more and more producers, especially from the YouTube ecosystem, turn to Patreon, and it is gratifying to see Firth’s initial success. While it is unrealistic for most short-form creators to cultivate a loyal fanbase like Firth’s, we applaud the opportunity for gifted voices like Firth to stay as dark and weird as he wants to be.