Bigtop Burger, well done
Worthikids is worthy of your time, and Bigtop Burger is the main attraction.
by Rollin Bishop
Some of my earliest internet memories involve trolling around Newgrounds and similar sites in the early 2000s, obsessing over Flash animation. Happy Tree Friends and Weebl and Bob were regular haunts, but also much more esoteric creations like checks notes DBZ Mawi Style. In hindsight, those creations made the internet feel massive and full of possibility. 25 years later, that feeling is tough to recreate, but Ian "Worthikids" Worthington's work on Bigtop Burger captures that same magic in a new way.
While Worthington's done plenty of one-off animations, Bigtop Burger is the longest-running series. Currently somewhere in its third season — which will be its last if Worthington's Q&A from 2024 is to be believed — Bigtop Burger follows a strange clown named Steve and his food truck, Bigtop Burger, and their collective conflict with a rival food truck, Zomburger, operated by actual zombie(?) and genuine lunatic Cesare.
Lord forgive me for saying this in the year two thousand and twenty-five, but there's a shocking amount of lore underneath the surface for audiences to uncover if anyone were so inclined to dig into it. Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats is surprisingly relevant, but I won't spoil exactly why or how here, even if… it likely wouldn't make sense written out anyway. Dinosaurs are involved.
Aside from those eccentricities, it's the actual animation and designs that really work for me in Bigtop Burger, with rough lines, at-times intentionally incomplete models, and spectacular expressions anchored in part by stellar performances from the series' cast of voice actors. Chris Fleming, who voices Cesare, is an absolute highlight as he riffs into oblivion.
Here, have a direct quote from Cesare in Bigtop Burger Season 2:
"Jesus, go--oh god, you guys… You guys ask SO many questions… I'm just trying to run the nation's WORST zombie-themed food truck and you guys HAVE TO… HIKE UP MY JEANS! Lookin' for LOOSE LINT!"
Don't get me wrong: Bigtop Burger is just the clearest example of what makes Worthikids appointment viewing in my household. Worthington's work as a whole is a delight, and you could likely watch his entire YouTube channel top to bottom, front to back, and be guaranteed to come away with a smile on your face and a surprising amount of knowledge. There's an absolutely fascinating Blender Grease Pencil tutorial, for example, that's worth every second of its 95-minute runtime.
Back in early 2022, Animation Obsessive published a fairly thorough interview with Worthington about his process that gets into just how much of Bigtop Burger is 3D vs. 2D animation, his approach to animating using Grease Pencil, and his production pipeline process at the time. It's a fascinating look into how the sausage is made and worth a full read, but it also exemplifies how strange and singular creation can be for creators who are largely left to their own devices.
"I think people look at the faces first and foremost, so as long as they're hand-drawn it hopefully gives the illusion of 2D-ish-ness," Worthington said at the time. "I also use displacement modifiers to make the characters kind of bumpy, and move the displacement around to give a shimmering effect. I think aberrations and imperfections are the beauty of 2D animation."
While not entirely 2D, aberrations and imperfections are certainly part of the beauty of Bigtop Burger. "They're just riffing over there, huh?" Tim, a Bigtop Burger employee, says in an early Season 1 episode. Hell yeah, man; they are.
/out of frame
👾 Rollin: I've been playing Pokemon Legends: Z-A and while some elements bore me to tears — miss me with this platforming — the character animations are above and beyond what the developers have accomplished previously. It's maybe the best a Pokemon game has ever looked in terms of fidelity, and feels like a real lived-in city, and a major part of that is because the individual characters are more dynamic than ever.
🦸♂ Kambole: Mostly cramming before I travel (and rewatching Chainsaw Man in time for the film), but the most recent episode of My Hero Academia drew me back into a series I thought I had mostly written off in recent years (both the show and the manga). It's not just because it's incredibly well-produced, but also because of its completion of one character's redemption arc, something which, to the show and original writer and artist Kohei Horikoshi's credit, was built with a lot of patience and sensitivity. This and Vigilantes have both been incredibly fun and richly textured comic book pulp at a time when superhero stories on screen have hit something of a creative plateau.
🌇 Toussaint: I recently had the good fortune to watch Yellow Sunset, a beautiful and heart wrenching animated short about the true story of a lorry driver-turned-soldier living amid the tumult of the 1966 Nigerian coup d'état and its aftermath. Created by Oghosa Ebengho, the film was produced as part of the Archivi.ng Fellowship, a six-month program dedicated to memorializing and promoting awareness of Nigerian history. Coincidentally, earlier this week I watched My Father's Shadow starring Sope Dirisu (Gangs of London), which I also highly recommend.