Theatre of the Unaligned

[JttQ BONUS EP] Mara - Forward

Added 2025-10-03 17:43:55 +0000 UTC

CW: Depiction of severe burns. These are a little bit dark lately, huh.

LUCKILY it doesn't stay dark! This one's a bit more uplifting. Yippee!

We wanted to focus a bit on Mara's journey from the worst day of her life to the person she's become. While we know what drives her emotionally, we wanted to show how exactly that fire burns and how it's changed over the years! It was really cool to design her starting point and animate how she grows to fix the axe.

Fun fact before this short I'd never actually animated a proper walk cycle before. Now I have done 3 :)

The CW depiction isn't quite as visceral as the Elliot short, but I'm also kind of desensitized to cartoon violence so I wanted to at least give folks a warning in case I was off-base in how upsetting the parent's hand is. Originally it was going to be a lot more graphic but 1. that felt a little dehumanizing in a way that didn't feel necessary and 2. I did NOT want to look up references and try to have to draw that. So instead I tried the tightrope of humanizing and just that little bit of graphic that makes the weight of the situation clear. Again, whether or not I actually accomplished that is up to audience discretion.

This time around, the compositing (lighting) stage was the trickiest! I'm very happy with how the shadows turned out, especially in the burnt forest shots.

Special thank you to Dark Fantasy Studios - the song is "Deep Lands" from the Imagine music pack!

Oooh I'm so excited for the next one, y'all. I wish I could make the main episodes look like these specials, but they're so time-consuming and difficult to make. But god dang do I love it when we can take the time to do stuff like this!

-Jay