"I drew Princess Peach and it came out kinda weird"- A Review of Allie Anime ASMR Documentary (10 HOURS) dir. Video Expert (2020)

Allie Anime ASMR Documentary (10 HOURS) is Now Showing as part of Hot Ticket to Public Cinema Programme

Like the covid era in which it was filmed, Allie Anime ASMR (10 HOURS) is haunted by a masturbatory subtext. The film, presented here in its 4-minute (short version) follows Allie, and how she came to practice drawing hentai. The space of Allie Anime is restrained and titillating. In this analgesic documentary we are invited into two locations: a deserted neighborhood park and to Allie’s apartment, which is stacked with a liberal arts college book collection and covered in unframed posters of glowing girls in purple swimsuits. The binaural 500 Hz Frequencies, the violently saturated green/purple/pinks and the sparse dialogue mix together like the video version of a big spoon of Cal-pol. In this cramped and hypnotic film, the editing takes centre stage in what the VideoExpert call- facetiously- ‘post-liminal cinema’.

The layers of glow filters, lens flares and cartoonish colour grading from self-proclaimed Video Experts Neal Wynne and Sabrina Greco, recalls Damon Packard’s Foxfur (2012)- incidentally, another film built around a sweet and mentally-unbalanced internet artist traipsing delusionally around California. ​​Unlike the blood-pressure-raising plots of Packard’s films, the narratives in VideoExpert films are sparse. Stock characters drift through a (2000s) Lynchian Meta-LA. Allie Anime- a video with just 220 views on YouTube, tucked away in a playlist titled "Sketches"- serves as an early experiment in developing an aesthetic that would culminate in their first feature, VideoExpert1, which premiered at VenueMOT in 2021.

Like Lynch, there is a skin-crawling uneasiness to Allie’s social world that feels like a parody of human connection. Iris-effect red circles pick out frames-within-frames with the hallucinatory objectivity of an outsider conspiracy documentary. The ugly overlays of anime girls that divide the film into sections ‘Documentary’ and ‘ASMR’; fragment the frame and call attention to the surface of the screen, holding off the pleasure of sinking into the smooth depth-illusion of what could-be-called Allie’s ‘Goon Cave’.

“Okay so everyone is playing Mario Kart on the switch and I drew Princess Peach and it came out kind of weird, but everyone said that looks good.” she says. We watch her make an ugly drawing and share it online; we watch her make an ugly loaf of bread and share it online. The film loops for 10 Hours, I once went to bed with it playing and woke up to her repeating: “everyone said that it looks good.”. Doomed to repeat herself; a victim of mass lifestyle influencing. An animated girl, making her art for others and maybe for her own ambient, alienated, sexual gratification.

Allie’s terrible art and terrible baking is a spoof of brightly-lit didactic lifestyle tutorial content. What Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky has called ‘The Process Genre’ (2024): easily digestible representations of labour that become an aesthetic salve for a society too complex for anyone to understand. The final shots of the film are incredibly mortal: she photographs her loaf in the dark.