On Wednesday, actor-comedian Zack Fox shared the primary episode of Yoppaman, an animated comedy collection a few dilapidated grits diner within the south, and it’s fuckin’ bonkers. The challenge was first teased again in April, when multi-hyphenate Donald Glover shared that he was working with Fox on an “anime” challenge throughout an episode of his Gilga radio reside stream.
Clocking in at simply over two and a half minutes, the primary episode of Yoppaman facilities the eccentric workers of a Waffle Home-inspired diner restaurant known as Pleased Grits. Whereas beating up an unruly buyer exterior the diner, the group transforms into Energy Rangers-style heroes to struggle towards the henchmen of a maniacal alien warlord who occurs to be hovering in his ship above the restaurant.
It’s chaotic and peculiar and bursting with character; the precise kind of anarchic comedy that’d really feel proper at house alongside the likes of Grownup Swim staples Black Dynamite and Freaknik: The Musical.
“In 2022 I began creating an animated concept with my good buddy and collaborator Chibu Okere,” Fox writes within the episode’s YouTube description. “We’re each Atlanta-raised artists who grew up on stuff like Devilman, FLCL, Evangelion, 90’s Cartoon Community, and naturally black southern folklore/music/comedy/style and so forth. So we wished to make one thing that synthesized all of that into a giant gumbo pot. Yoppaman is the spawn of that synthesis.”
The resemblance is actually putting. The design of characters and backgrounds looks like a mixture of Hiroyuki Imaishi’s cult anime movie Lifeless Leaves, Taiyō Matsumoto’s Tekkonkinkreet, and Ronald Wimberly’s graphic novel GratNin. However even past these comparisons, Yoppaman looks like a ardour challenge by means of and thru and a artistic breath of recent air for followers of each anime and grownup animation.
The episode was produced by Six Level Harness, Inc, a Los Angeles-based studio that beforehand labored on the 2019 musical movie Guava Island starring Donald Glover, with music written and carried out by Devin Morrison. The present’s web site hints that extra episodes of the collection might be popping out quickly, with Fox and Okere seeking to nurture the challenge “with out the affect (or hindrance) of a community” earlier than turning Yoppaman into a totally realized present.