Movies - Spoilsbury Toast Boy

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	Movies - Spoilsbury Toast Boy

Spoilsbury Toast Boy is a surreal, expressionist Flash cartoon series created by David Firth. The series is comprised of three cartoons, the second being the prequel to the first, and the third the prequel to the second.

Spoilsbury Toast Boy is the protagonist, a pale young boy who lives in constant fear. Toast Boy is haunted by hallucinations, which seem to be caused by small beetles that infest his brain. His family consists of a deformed, cackling grandmother and a sister, Liache. They inhabit a large, featureless grey building riddled with cracks and infested with beetles.

In Toast Boy's world, it seems that human-sized beetles are in control of a dystopian, kafka-esque wasteland, and the humans are subject to their unpleasant whims. In the third episode, for instance, Toast Boy and other children are supervised by beetles as they are systematically forced to make an endless supply of toast to feed to their giant leader. These beetles are a society of tricksters who claim to be excellent medical doctors and use treatments that cause their patients to be killed in extravagant ways, for example, curing a stuffy nose by drowning the patient. Whether the beetles believe their own rhetoric (that they serve an opaque general good) or that they simply delight in tormenting their charges is open to debate.

Episode Guide - spoilers

The episodes progress in a reverse narrative. The prequels "Spoilsbury Toastboy -1" and "Spoilsbury Toast Boy -2" serve to provide explanations to the seemingly arbitrary series of events of episode one, which lead to Toast Boy's death.

Spoilsbury Toastboy

The episode opens inside a twisted, grey building, with Toast Boy taking a piece of paper reading "9.41" off the wall. He then sits down in a corner, apparently waiting for something. As he waits, a small beetle crawls into his ear. A look at the clock on the far wall reveals that Toast Boy is suffering from hallucinations; the time piece screams as numbers and strange figures drip off it. In the next scene, Toast Boy is shown walking into another building, presenting himself to a receptionist. Although their conversation is barely discernable, by coughing up several more beetles Toast Boy is apparently able to convey what is wrong to the receptionist, and is pointed to the third door on the left. Upon entry Toast Boy is greeted by a big beetle, who escorts him into the next room, bidding him to lie down on a table so that "we can make things work again". A metal pole descends until it is just above Toast Boy, before suddenly producing knives and stabbing him to death. The operation complete, the beetle finishes the episode by saying "I expect you feel much better after that".

Spoilsbury Toastboy -1

The episode opens inside Spoilsbury Toast Boy's grandma's room, who is sat in a rocking chair in front of but facing away from a fire. Toast Boy walks in and is greeted by his grandmother, who tells him she wants to give him a big sloppy kiss. Before Toast Boy can do anything, he hallucinates two beetles, who urge him to kill her. As his hallucinations become yet more nightmarish, his grandmother asks him to fetch a spotted huckleberry leaf. The next scene shows the Toast Boy picking one of the large, slimy plants and dragging it back to the grey, rectangle shaped house. As he walks in, he is confronted by drifts of smoke and an awful smell, both of which get steadily worse as he approaches grandma's room, to the point where he has to throw up before entering. Inside he is horrified to find that his grandmother has fallen backwards into the fire, and her head has burnt down to the skull. A small jam jar on the floor suddenly opens up and a large beetle materialises, screeching that it burned her. Before anything else happens, Toast Boy is apparently transported to another room, where two other beetles tell him the mental trauma he's been suffering can be easily cured with their machinery, reassuring him that they are good beetles and want only to help. How much of any of this is imagined by Toast Boy himself, as with all of the Spoilsbury films, is open to question.

Spoilsbury Toastboy -2

The episode opens outside the grey building in which Toast Boy and his family live in. Toast Boy is shown peering out across the wasteland which surrounds his home, before his attention his drawn to an urgent banging on the wall. This is revealed to be the work of a beetle, who teases Toast Boy before telling him it's been spying on him in the shower. Toast Boy is then grabbed by a robotic arm and summarily dumped in his work place, where children slave to provide toasties for a hugely obese beetle. The big beetle demands that Toast Boy's shoe is added to the broth, which another beetle proceeds to do. The next scene shows Toast Boy's grandmother, her face swarming with smaller beetles; the attention snaps to the room above, in which Toast Boy's sister Liache is shown standing in "Doctor Jill's Practice". A doctor Beetle appears, and tells Liache that she should treat the mucus that makes her breathing difficult with respect; if she doesn't, she doesn't deserve to breathe at all. Later on, Liache and Toast Boy are shown in bed together, Liache telling her brother that she suspects that "granny is a witch, she's going to cook us for the beetles". They are ordered to sleep by a robotic voice; after they do so, a small army of beetles are shown watching them. One declares that pleasant thoughts are a distraction, falls out of a ceiling hatch and crawls into Toast Boy's ear. What follows is a gruesome dream sequence; terrible images of grandma being raped by beetles and turning into a beetle herself are run into relatively peaceful scenes, one featuring what appears to be Toast Boy's father. Toast Boy wakes up in a sweat to find Liache gone. The next scene shows Toast Boy and his grandmother back in the room with the fire. Grandma bids Toast Boy to moisten her "gash" with some cream, which he does so with visible disgust, withdrawing his hand to find several beetles stuck to it. He asks where Liache has gone; grandma replies that she is currently residing at a different postcode. The action cuts to Liache, tied upside down above a pool of water. Two beetles say that her mucus has told them that she doesn't deserve to breathe, and as they lower her into the pool to drown, that "you've just got to trust us on these things, we're in the know".

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