Felix Colgrave’s ‘Donks’ Offers A Sly Commentary On Ocean Plastics

Filmmaker Felix Golgrave has uploaded his latest musical short Donks to Youtube.

Using digital collage techniques, the six-and-a-half-minute short is aesthetically and sonically pleasing, featuring a bright mix of absurd sound effects (including fun use of the Hanna Barbera Sound FX library) and thrumming music behind smoothly animated semi-familiar shapes that crawl around, conjoin, and break apart, defying establish laws of logic and physics.

Despite the film’s surreal visuals and sounds, it’s clear that Colgrave is commenting on the subject of ocean plastics. In one of the film’s most straightforward scenes, a barge dumps a mountain of brightly colored donks into the sea, kicking off a messy underwater bacchanal between the toys and oceanic bottom feeders.

According to Colgrave, the film’s characters were inspired by “a box of miscellaneous plastic objects my child has. Things that are not categorically blocks or figurines or anything describable. I referred to them as ‘gonks,’ which was pronounced by my then-2-year-old as ‘donks.’ This film was me making my own set of donks and building silly things out of them.”

Colgrave spent 16 months working on Donks, directing, animating, and writing its music. It’s produced by the incredibly independent Wombot Studio, which he and his wife operate out of their garage. Colgrave funded the short with donations from his 2,300-plus Patreon subscribers.