No, no stuffy thinkpiece… No, today, I want to talk a little bit about a video game. I barely play video games these days, even though I admire and love the video game medium. I played video games when I had more free time, when I was younger, so nowadays it’s just a matter of squeezing in play sessions.
So, not too long ago, I picked up the PS4 version of a PC game called Bendy and the Ink Machine. Released as five individual chapters from early 2017 to late 2018, the puzzle-horror adventure was a good-sized success and spawned a big fanbase, and eventually found its way to consoles, with all five chapters included plus some other stuff. It also coincidentally debuted around the same time as another video game that’s an affectionate love letter to the Golden Age of American Animation, Studio MDHR’s Cuphead.
It is super satisfying to see not one, but two rather popular video games exploring what I feel was one of the greatest periods for animation. The early-to-mid 1930s was the time of early Disney, early WB, heyday Fleischer, and little offbeat studios here and there. This was a time when animation had a level of respect that we don’t see today, this was a time when animation was funny cartoons before live-action movies, animation wasn’t a “kiddie” thing like it’s considered nowadays. Cartoons were mainly black-and-white, unless they were made by Walt Disney. There’s such a charm to the B&W Disney, Fleischer, WB, and Van Beuren cartoons. Today, they still hold up. You ever wonder why you see 1935-era Mickey Mouse on graphic T-shirts instead of the more corporate, eyeballs-with-pupils version of Mickey? When people discover Fleischer cartoons, they’re blown away by just how innovative, strange, and next-level they are. The love for cartoons of this age is present in other forms of media, sometimes for humor, sometimes for homage, the list goes on…
Bendy and the Ink Machine posits… What if the leader of one of the animation studios in the early 1930s got super ambitious and turned what should’ve been a dream into a nightmare? A sort of reverse Walt Disney in some ways. That man would happen to be Joey Drew, whom you don’t see throughout the bulk of the game, a man who you only hear through pre-recorded messages. You would think this jovial-sounding chap wanted to do something special, but what he has created is no Disney-esque empire, but rather a cartoon horror. This is one hell of a premise…
In the game, you play as former lead animator Henry. Set in the early 1960s, you return to the very studio you left, and you see that it is not what it used to be. Hallways are decrepit, ink is sputtering from the ceiling and walls, junk is everywhere, it already makes one feel uneasy. The very muted, near black-and-white color scheme accentuates this surreal nightmare of a rundown cartoon house. Setting it in the 1960s almost makes it a subtle portrait of where animation ended up by that point in time. Animation’s Golden Age either ended sometime in the 1950s or sometime in the 1960s, depending on who you ask. By 1966, many cartoon houses closed up shop, theatrically-released short cartoons were slowly ceasing to be, cheapo kid-centric Saturday morning cartoons dominated the industry, Walt Disney died. Animation’s glory days were perhaps behind it, and the state of Joey Drew’s studio in the first chapter of the game is quite an apt illustration of the end of animation’s first golden period. Back to the game itself, it also doesn’t help that Joey Drew Studios’ cartoon superstar was a little demon, Bendy himself. Soon, you begin seeing some truly unsettling things. You see a gutted version of the cartoon character Boris the Wolf (who looks a lot like Goofy) on a Frankenstein-like bed, jumbo-sized cut-outs of Bendy and his affixed smile randomly appear, and then a demonic version of Bendy himself, who nearly kills you!
As the game progresses, you learn more and more about the twisted history of this cartoon studio turned empire. Joey Drew and some of his employees started to worship the Ink Machine, which was an attempt at creating real-life cartoon characters. Forget Disneyland and its intricately-designed costumes, Drew was onto something bigger, making exact copies of cartoons, bringing them to life in the real world. Almost a subtle jab at Hollywood trying to live-actionize every animated property in sight, yes? He first attempts to make this happen by running the filmstrips through the machine, but that only creates the demonic Bendy that appears throughout the game like the pterodactyl does in Joust. Some employees became horrifying monsters after being put through the machine, and soon it becomes clear that Drew wanted to turn *real people* into all-ink beings that could be molded into cartoon characters. Joey Drew at one point also wanted to pursue an amusement park, only for that go completely awry as he arrogantly tried to leave out the theme park designer who helped him create the attractions for his planned Bendy Land. Unlike Walt Disney, Joey Drew is truly just an “idea man”, but an ambitious man nonetheless. What his empire left was a building full of inky monsters, threats, and terrifying traps.
On the surface, it’s basically “What if Walt Disney was truly evil and nearly brought real horrors unto the world?” The game’s official description passes it off as some kind of edgelord cartoon fantasy, with a tagline saying it’ll “ruin your childhood love of cartoons”… But beyond that gimmick, I – an out and out fan of animation of all eras who firmly believes (no, scratch that, KNOWS) that animation is not a children’s medium meant to be relegated as stuff from your younger years – found plenty to enjoy in Bendy and the Ink Machine, even if I have issues with it as a game, with its story, and some of its intentions. I have never played Cuphead, because I never had an XBOX One nor do I currently have a PC. The Switch release happened weeks ago, but it’s digital only, and I’m stubborn when it comes to that. I am patiently awaiting a physical release of the Switch version, then, I will snatch it up and play it! Cuphead seems more like a loving tribute to animation’s Golden Age, particularly the Fleischer and Disney cartoons of the era, Bendy and the Ink Machine basically says “Hey kids, what if it was like REALLY DARK?” I should really hate that idea, yet I found myself intrigued by the story and I enjoyed the various puzzles. Since I’m not some preteen who is trying to “outgrow” animation, I know that there already is a fascinating element of darkness in many 30s cartoons, in and out of the context of the times they were made in. The Mad Doctor and Bimbo’s Initiation are great examples of pre-Snow White animated works that scared many a young’un for decades. Devils and demons often featured in a lot of cartoons during this time, such as The Goddess of Spring and Hell’s Bells. Perhaps it was the Hayes Code that put an end to that, and perhaps in Bendy‘s universe, the same thing ended Joey Drew’s cartoon series. Cuphead doesn’t slouch on the demon side of things either, as it’s in the title, Cuphead in “Don’t Deal With the Devil”. One game has you living a cartoon fantasy, the other is set in a world where someone tried to make cartoon fantasies real and created terrors
Now, Bendy and the Ink Machine‘s team are at work on a sequel called Bendy and the Dark Revival. The title makes me wonder if it’ll continue to have parallels with the history of animation, whether intentional or not. Joey Drew’s studio presumably shut down around the late 1930s, as the Bendy gang were never depicted in Technicolor, which expanded into more cartoons by then outside of just Disney’s. The Fleischers did a few two-reel Technicolor Popeye cartoons to coax their distributor, Paramount, to finance a feature-length animated film. They did, and we got two – Gulliver’s Travels in 1939 and Mr. Bug Goes to Town in 1941. Warner Bros., MGM, and just about all of them were making color cartoons by 1940. Joey Drew may have had the ambitions of Walt Disney, but his studio seemed to last as long as Van Beuren Studios. With this in mind, Bendy cartoons stopped happening before World War II broke out. So… A revival? Since the first game is set in the 1960s, would this mean that Bendy and his pals are being revived through an actual product?
Going by what was going on with animation in the mid-1960s, I could only assume that Bendy would be revived via a Saturday morning cartoon series. Hey, this same thing worked for Felix the Cat! The first ever cartoon superstar was introduced a century ago, and didn’t quite make it past the black-and-white days despite his initial popularity in a pre-Mickey Mouse age of animation. He was given an all-color, talky cartoon series in the late 1950s, and from there he had a second life. Most people, if they even know Felix the Cat to begin with, are more familiar with his 1958 iteration than they are his 1919 iteration. I can imagine the sequel being about someone reviving Bendy as an innocuous, color Saturday morning cartoon and spawning new nightmares… Or maybe not, maybe “Dark Revival” means something else entirely, and something that has ZERO to do with animation history. Maybe I’m just over-speculating, but I think it would be interesting if that route was taken, given the parallels to animation history present in the first game.
