"Salad Fingers"
Stories by David Firth using flash animation
Salad Fingers tells the 9 part story of a psychotic little character who lives alone out in a wasteland and is driven insane by loneliness and possibly insanity.
The first part "Spoons" seems to be about his break from reality where he licks various rusty objects. He also apparently freaks out a boy character that screams at him.
The second part "Friends" is about Salad Fingers apparently committing as bizarre murder by putting a boy in an oven and then later on imagining his finger puppets led him to do it.
In the third one "Nettles" Salad Fingers meets an annoying salesman (or his Father) and allegedly murders him to hang him on a hook, revealing his serial killer side, but it may be part of a fantasy as he also imagines stinging nettles also.
The fourth story "Cage" is even more bizarre, as Salad Fingers imagines going to France through a water faucet, called a tap, and also a screaming boy who seems to love him, as he sees it in his warped mind, and he's in a locked room, maybe a panic room or shelter, at one point.(The brother imagery possibly).
Then in the fifth story "Picnic" it appears Salad Fingers has a psychotic episode where he imagines he has a girlfriend, who is actually a girl he has taken, but it may be imaginary. He then has a picnic with her but something horrible is going on. (The girl imagery is gross).
In the sixth one, "Present", the audience learns that Salad Fingers has definite mutiple personalities, those of possibly his victims, and one of them holds him to account about deflowering someone's daughter, possibly in reference to the last story, or not.
The seventh one, "Shore Leave" implies that the Great War, which is ongoing in the story, has a temporary respite where his imaginary friend comes back, but he is just a dead person found near his house.
In the eight story, "Cupboard" the secret hiding place where Salad Fingers hides in drives him ever more mad when he is spooked one night and imagines his broken radio is speaking and cursing him.
Then finally in the ninth story, "Letter", Salad Fingers has completely lost it and imagines his scary tree is alive after he bites a branch from it, and the tree makes him pregnant with a strange monster, but then he names it Yvonne and gross things happen when he meets a neighbor.
It isn't clear entirely what is going on in these little short cartoons with the green long fingered alien man. Clearly he has a split from reality and has schizoid tendencies that might have led to murder. Many fans of this series, from 2004 to 2011, have tried to analyze what it means.
It is just David Firth's attempt to be gross, but having seen some of his other works on the net, he likes psycho drama and mixes it will murderers and psychopaths. From the other stories, the Salad Fingers one can be explained, sort of.
Because of the references in the story, it takes place in Europe some time just prior to World War II, referencing 'The Great War', which was World War I. Salad Fingers had been a man who was not able to go into the war because he was already deluded, but his abusive family drove him more mad while his friend and his brother went off to war and were killed. He went mad and killed his family. Then possibly he was gassed and it made him even more crazy. It may also reference a mental war between reality and fantasy, as Salad Fingers is clearly beyond borderline personality disorder into full blown paranoid schizophrenic sociopath.
The town in which he lives is not a wasteland. The people there that try to help him are shunned away and scorn him in the end. Some of them are killed, including a man, a mother with a baby, (hence that image), some children and so forth, which is horrible. Others run off. In the end he attempts to make amends by helping out in town, but he again is shunned bwecause he is a horrible killer. It could even be that all of his killer ideas are just fantasies, but this is not likely. That's just a number of net theories strung together.
The story is twisted and to call it good or excellent would be weird, or even entertaining with be a stretch, but it personifies the frantic counter culture of the bloggers and some of the net people who are out there and on another planet. They might enjoy it. It is not for the timid. It is horror.
Review by Adam Browne
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