5 out of 5

Created by: Vernon Chatman

Wonder Showzen was crass brilliance; absurdist art blended with prankster glee, but with a delightfully uncomfortable ‘Who is this joke on?’ sensibility.  Xavier: Renegade Angel came with a learning curve of seeming stupidity (as in: you had to be really stupid to get into it), but that, of course, was just one layer of the onion, peeled back – addictively, once you were ensnared by the show’s indescribable allure – to reveal holy genius.  The Heart, She Holler was… something, which I haven’t quite figured out how to watch.  But it was something!

The Shivering Truth is also something.  Claymation shorts of pure word association, the nearest relative is Xavier’s nonsense, but Chatman springboards more off of that show’s tone of philosophizing and couches it less so in stupidity and more in this oddly relative sense of nightmare.  Shivering Truth’s episodes springboard from fears, or from obsessions… and then they go haywire.  In the kinda way where a kid scratches a scab and it turns into a church… made of a scab.  In which a child is the best peek-a-boo player ever, and when she hides her eyes, her parents go insane in search of her.  This is disgusting, horrifying stuff.  And hilarious?  Y’know, in the way where you’re not sure if you should be laughing, which wraps back around to Wonder Showzen’s discomforts, but this time, you can’t blame it on that show’s reliance on shock humor involving kids.  It’s just you, and eleven minutes of bizarro, outsider wonderment, unleashed from live action to the no-concept-is-too-strange world of animation.

As a bonus, the claymation is damn stunningly put together.

You will know whether or not this is for you within moments.