Donald Glover and Zack Fox’s animated comedy Yoppaman is completely bonkers
On Wednesday, actor-comedian Zack Fox shared the first episode of Yoppaman, an animated comedy series about a dilapidated grits diner in the south, and it’s fuckin’ bonkers. The project was first teased back in April, when multi-hyphenate Donald Glover shared that he was working with Fox on an “anime” project during an episode of his Gilga radio live stream.
Clocking in at just over two and a half minutes, the first episode of Yoppaman centers the eccentric employees of a Waffle House-inspired diner restaurant called Happy Grits. While beating up an unruly customer outside the diner, the group transforms into Power Rangers-style heroes to fight against the henchmen of a maniacal alien warlord who happens to be hovering in his ship above the restaurant.
It’s chaotic and weird and bursting with personality; the exact type of anarchic comedy that’d feel right at home alongside the likes of Adult Swim staples Black Dynamite and Freaknik: The Musical.
A post shared by Chibu Okere (@chibuyum)
“In 2022 I started developing an animated idea with my good friend and collaborator Chibu Okere,” Fox writes in the episode’s YouTube description. “We’re both Atlanta-raised artists who grew up on stuff like Devilman, FLCL, Evangelion, 90’s Cartoon Network, and of course black southern folklore/music/comedy/fashion etc. So we wanted to make something that synthesized all of that into a big gumbo pot. Yoppaman is the spawn of that synthesis.”
The resemblance is certainly striking. The design of characters and backgrounds feels like a combination of Hiroyuki Imaishi’s cult anime film Dead Leaves, Taiyō Matsumoto’s Tekkonkinkreet, and Ronald Wimberly’s graphic novel GratNin. But even beyond those comparisons, Yoppaman feels like a passion project through and through and a creative breath of fresh air for fans of both anime and adult animation.
The episode was produced by Six Point Harness, Inc, a Los Angeles-based studio that previously worked on the 2019 musical film Guava Island st
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