Should've Gone with the Porn - The Uncanny Valley: Dragged In

Well that was different. It’s own trailer made it look like it’d be darker than it was, and Dragonbored had set my expectations of what the tone of the anthology would be. And that’s probably deliberate on both counts. It even started out with a typical ‘loser with a crappy job gets called on to save the world’ thing, but then it turns out the aliens just want our cats! Which in hindsight they were clearly hinting at, with the music playing in the clinic and the two customers both having cats (at least I assume the guy getting his pet back had a cat, since ‘Fluffy’ is a stereotypical cat name); plus, the aliens learned about us through the internet, and as we all know, everything on the internet is just incidental sideshows for its real purpose – porn, and cat videos. So in a sense it’s just an extended take on that joke, and while I did suspect it might be cats when the aliens said “this species,” I was sort of disappointed it wasn’t something weirder or more obscure. But that quickly changed, because the rest of the short was really funny. And even a bit sad – I thought Phelous in particular did a good job of acting really sad he’d lost his cat. And even though the rest mostly did their performances as straight-up jokes, it’s still true that we’d all be sad if we suddenly lost our cats. Which made the part where the aliens discover everything else about cat behaviour really funny. Because, as any cat owner can tell you, it’s all those obnoxious behaviours that leave you convinced your cat is deliberately being an asshole or has an evil agenda, not just those that look adorably hilarious in a YouTube video, that make cats endearing. That’s probably true of any pet, but it’s cats that dominate the world of online videos and memes, so there you go. So yeah, not what I expected, but that’s definitely the point. It was still funny, a lot of fun to watch, and a loving tribute to cats and pets in general. I’m curious to see what they’ll do with the next one.