Don't Hug Me I'm Scared

Plot

Each episode revolves around Yellow Guy, Red Guy, and Duck Guy meeting one or several anthropomorphic characters, who begin a musical number related to a basic concept of day-to-day life with an upbeat melody similar to that of a nursery rhyme. As each song progresses, it becomes apparent that its moral or message is nonsensical or self-contradicting, and that the "teacher" character has ulterior or sinister motives. The climax of each episode typically involves a shock element with use of graphic violence, and sometimes other coercive or warped themes.

Episode 1

The first episode begins in a kitchen where the main cast is eating breakfast. A singing sketchbook teaches the main characters to "get creative", singing about childlike activities. The climax of the episode is an exaggerated depiction of 'creativity' in which the puppets dance increasingly erratically and engage in deranged acts like covering a heart in glitter and serving a cake made from viscera, complete with shaky camera shots and increasingly frantic music. The video ends with everything seemingly restored to normal and the sketchbook telling the puppets to "never be creative again".

Episode 2

A talking clock, Tony, sings about time. The protagonists question the reality of time, to Tony's annoyance. Tony then accelerates the passage of time, rapidly aging the cast. The events are revealed to be part of a television programme watched by the three friends, although the end credits imply the rotting was real due to yellow guy's hair being visible and maggots appearing to multiply as a result of him rotting over time. This episode introduces Yellow Guy's father, Roy.

Episode 3

At a picnic with Yellow Guy and Red Guy, Duck Guy kills a butterfly. Yellow Guy, distressed, flees to a tree and is found by a butterfly, Shrignold. He and his friends sing about love, saying that true love is kept for one's 'special one'. After a brief anecdote featuring 'Michael, the loneliest boy in town', Shrignold then introduces Yellow Guy to Malcolm, the 'King of Love', and the leader of a cult whom they worship by feeding gravel to him. The plot takes a sinister turn when the cult explains that he must lose his memories and name. The video ends with Yellow Guy waking up where he started, and his friends bringing him an egg which splits, revealing a maggot-like creature who calls Yellow Guy "father" and is promptly squashed by Duck Guy.

Episode 4

The protagonists are playing a board game. Colin, a talking computer, randomly begins to sing about how clever he is. He becomes enraged when Red Guy expresses frustration at his questions not being answered and promptly slams his keyboard. This makes Colin take the characters to the 'Digital World'. Colin sings about the "Three Main Activities of the Digital World" – viewing different graphs, Digital Style, and Digital Dancing. These are repeated until a room becomes populated with distorted dancing clones of Colin, Yellow Guy and Duck Guy. Red Guy escapes to find a film crew wearing spandex suits apparently filming a crude replica of the first episode. A crewman snaps a clapperboard, whereupon Red Guy's head suddenly explodes into glitter.

Episode 5

The other two main characters seem unable to understand that Red Guy is missing, although they are aware that something has changed. Various characters led by a lamb chop gives increasingly bizarre and self-contradictory advice about eating habits in song. The song is stopped twice by the telephone ringing. Duck Guy answers the telephone, but does not respond to what he hears on the line. Eventually, he becomes irritated and runs off-set, knocking over the camera. He wakes up in an operating room to find a large tin can eating his organs. Yellow Guy continues following the song and becomes bloated from eating cans of meat labeled with Duck Guy's picture. During the credits sequence, Red Guy is seen dressed in a coat and scarf, walking away from a phone booth carrying a suitcase, revealing he was the one calling throughout the episode. The creators claim that a phone number printed on the phone booth in this video was being called within seconds of the episode's release, which at first they would answer and pretend to be characters from the show.

Episode 6

Yellow Guy is in bed, crying because he misses his friends. As he tries to go to sleep, a lamp who sings about dreams appears. Despite Yellow Guy's protests, the Lamp drags him along for an animated sequence that ends with him having a dream about drowning in oil. Yellow Guy then wakes to see the Lamp transform his mattress into oil. Red Guy wakes in an office with multiple other red people wearing clothing. He starts to sing a song about an office file. Later, at a bar, he performs the Creativity song from episode 1. The crowd starts booing. Red Guy notices Roy in the crowd. The microphone and boombox turn into teacher-puppets and he is transported to a dark black room. Red Guy follows the sound of the dream song to a machine with monitors showing Yellow Guy. Red Guy presses buttons that transform the lamp into other characters including Tony and Colin. Roy taps Red Guy on the shoulder with a massively elongated arm. Seeing Yellow Guy becoming gaunt from his ordeal, Red Guy disconnects the machine's power supply. The scene cuts to a reshoot of episode 1 with the protagonists recoloured. The calendar turns from 19 to 20 June. A sketchbook starts singing but is cut off as the episode ends.

Characters

Unnamed characters in episode 6

Production

Sloan and Pelling met while studying Fine Art, and Animation respectively at Kingston University where they started THIS IS IT Collective with some friends. They produced the first episode of Don't Hug Me I'm Scared in their free time with no budget. When they started on the project they imagined making it into a series, but initially dropped the idea after finishing the first episode. After the short film gained popularity, they decided to expand it into a series. Channel 4's Random Acts commissioned the second episode. The show soon attracted mainstream commissioners, but Sloan and Pelling turned them down because they "wanted to keep it fairly odd" and "have the freedom to do exactly what we wanted."

In May 2013, Sloan and Pelling announced that they would start a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to make four or more additional episodes, one every three months, starting in September 2014. They uploaded low-quality camera footage of the characters being taken hostage and held for ransom. A 12-year-old American boy tried to use hacked credit card information to donate £35,000 to the campaign, but he was caught and those funds were thrown out. Their Kickstarter goal of £96,000 was reached on 19 June 2014, and in total £104,935 was raised.

In January 2016, Sloan and Pelling collaborated with Lazy Oaf to release a line of clothing based on the characters and themes of the show.

Reception

The original short film became a viral hit and the series grew to become a cult phenomenon. The six episodes have so far amassed 94.6 million views on YouTube. Scott Beggs listed the original short film as number 8 on his list of the 11 best short films of 2011. Carolina Mardones listed the first episode as number 7 in her top ten short films of 2011. It was also included in as part of a cinema event in Banksy's Dismaland. In April 2016, the main characters of the series were featured on the cover of the magazine Printed Pages, along with an "interview" of the three main characters written by the magazine's editor. All six episodes of DHMIS were included in the September 2016 festival XOXO.

Drew Grant of the Observer wrote that the series episodes are "horrifying nightmarish absolutely beautiful" and "mind-melting". Freelance writer Benjamin Hiorns observed that "it's not the subject matter that makes these films so strangely alluring, it's the strikingly imaginative set and character design and the underlying Britishness of it all." Joe Blevins of The A.V. Club praised the show's "sense-to-nonsense ratio" and its production values. Samantha Joy of TenEighty praised the sixth episode of the series, writing that it "creates a provocative end to a pretty dark narrative about content creation."

Themes

Pelling, when asked about how the film came about, said that the purpose was "how not to teach something" and "how an abstract concept like creativity is kind of stupid when people try to teach it in a limited way that [they] do". In addition, he comments on how the video is open for interpretation, and how, when different people reach different conclusions about the video, they may all be valid in their own right.

A student writer for Nouse compared the appeal of the first episode to themes in Gothic literature, arguing that they are both "tapping into the same cultural fear of a violent subconscious hiding beneath the facade of normality." In The Wesleyan Argus, another student writer called the series a "fine example of the era of esotericism" and noted that, "There is a building meta-commentary on the relationships between viewer, perception, creator, participant, and art (and perhaps death) that began with the first episode, but what that commentary is trying to say is not yet entirely clear. However, there is an absolute sense that the series is building toward a culmination."

Creators

Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling are British graphic designers, artists and animators. Their advertising runs through commercial productions. The duo have worked as part of the THIS IS IT Collective.

Their content consists of videos, graphic design art, animation, music, and working with real-life materials to resemble things in the real world as art. They have won multiple awards, including the 2012 SXSW Midnight Shorts Award, and the 2016 ADC Young Guns award.