animation project
Cartoon Comatose is a 20-minute animated short about the experience of surviving a major medical crisis. In the short, our protagonist involuntarily ends up inside her own mind, where she must confront her personified emotions (conscience, humor, love, creativity and autism) and figure out a way of living past her near death experience.
Cartoon Comatose is directly based on the creator's life. After graduating from college in 2023 the Animator fell into a three day diabetic coma. Unable to work, she needed a way to process her own emotions that felt too large to comprehend.
Cartoon Comatose is a project made to keep the creator sane after many frustrating doctors appointments, and even worst days in bed. Many revisions have been made since the first draft. Editing and trimming used to continuously grasp the shifting feelings of its author. While it has taken many hours toiling away at a project too big for one person to finish in any reasonable time, the healing it has done for its author has been life changing.
Three
worlds
The story starts off in the real world, after our main charter gets sucked in we visit the world inside her head. Finally we end up in the bottom of her soul, where the protagonist must confront her emotional exhaustion if she ever wants to be whole again.
Our protagonist, here in both human and fish form. Fish hasn't been able to draw a single thing after her coma. She is tormented by the want to create but the inability to start. Thus her own emotions tear through reality to bring her inside her own head. There she learns if she wants to continue with her life she must create to survive.
Fish out
of water
Extra Work
The rest of the cast.
From Left to right, Love, Autism, Creativity, Conscience, Humor.
Rough work and cut Characters
Sadness and Anger were initially the antagonist of the film. They were a being that had two heads and one body. The more dominant emotion would take over the body while holding the head around in its arms. They got cut so the story could focus on the lack of emotion after surviving vs the grief.
