Review: Wet City
Looking for treasure? Cause this short series is a gem.
Overview:
New Jersey, and presumably the rest of the world has been struck by an apocalypse. Involving a robot invasion, the Jersey Shore is entirely underwater. Our hero is content with waiting out his life eating BBQ chips and watching DVDs, that is until a group of raiders known as ‘The Founders’ kidnaps his pet vegetarian shark.
Determined to save his friend, he travels the open sea to hunt down ‘The Founders’ but unfortunately is captured. Now their slave, the man adapts to the healthy lifestyle provided. He even manages to find love. However, when he comes across a shaking revelation, he is forced to decide his own fate.
Our Take:
Get ready for a treasure. Wet City will surprise you with its deep concepts and soaking creativity. Created by Nate Sherman and Nick Vokey, the show was released in three parts for the Adult Swim SMALLS shorts program. All episodes are available on YouTube and fill up less than fifteen minutes. Fifteen-minutes of in-depth storytelling and worldbuilding. Wet City is a unique and wonderful addition to the growing independent level content that Adult Swim has been releasing.
From the moment you are brought into the world of Wet City curiosity is peaked with its mellow tone and soothing music. As the protagonist describes the end of the world and his melancholy approach, it is hard not to resonate with him. On their own, the first couple of minutes are an excellent description for falling into depression and allowing the world to float by. Which makes the harrowing adventure he is about to go on all that more powerful.
It’s so easy to cheer for the hero who is willing to step out of his comfort zone for loyalty. Even if the commitment is towards a cybernetic vegetarian shark. And our heroes willingness to do whatever it takes drives the story forward and causes him to make mistakes along the way. As he finds the other side to be productive and healthy, he sees what the world has to offer, even as a slave. But, of course, none of this can be real, or attainable, it would not be right for life to fall into his lap like such. Bringing us to the twist ending that really rocks the boat in this world, they have created.
From start to finish Wet City captures and takes you along for the ride. It is deceiving how much is packed into this story as everything progresses with the heroes monotone voiceover. But, this is a more well rounded and conceptualized plot than you can find most places these days. In fact, there is more going on in this 14-minutes than full seasons of Game of Thrones. Sure, the animation could have done with a pumped-up budget or more unique styling, but that is easily overlooked when offered such a rich tale. Pacified and blissful is the best way to describe the feeling of watching Wet City the whole way through. This was honestly one of the best treasures I have seen since becoming a reviewer on Bubbleblabber, and I couldn’t recommend it more. I am going to go watch it again now.
A pure gem. Full score!
Hi Ashley, thank you so much for reading and we love the feedback. Note that on that day we had 14th posts go up and only ten posts show on the front page, so it's possible the preview had already been archived by the time you got to it. One recommendation would be to add our RSS feed to your favorite news aggregator service like Feedly, this way you get all of the latest posts!