Moonshine Animations (or just Moonshine/Moon) is a South Korean-American YouTuber who specializes in making Stop Motion animations on his youtube channel
with various toys and figures, many of which are short skits or parodies, with a handful of longer running series here and there.
He often works with his friend and fellow YouTuber Emirichu, who provides voices for several of his characters, most notably Cecilia, one of the oldest mascots for his channel.
Series made by Moonshine Animations:
- Off the Gridnote
- Shrapnel
Tropes present in and relating to Moonshine Animations works:
- Animesque: Many of his original characters are either custom or kit-bashed figmas, causing them to look something like anime characters come to life (or at least the closest you can get when effectively working with dolls). The likeness is much more apparent in pieces of official character artwork.
- Author Appeal:
- Dark and gritty settings, creepy monsters, westerns, action, cool weapons, blood & gore, and anime girls.
- Learning Exposition through the setting, story, and character interactions rather than constant info dumps.
- Bathos: Some of the humor in his videos comes from how he has cute or silly characters from different franchises doing serious, scary, or terrible things, like redoing a scene from Pulp Fiction but with the main characters replaced with anime girls, or the interview scene from Joker with various Disney characters, recreating a bank robbery from a Batman film with Animal Crossing characters, and so on.
- Sometimes it will be the other way around, and he will have various villains and Big Bads doing mundane or comedic things they wouldn’t do in their respective franchises.
- Bloodier and Gorier: Much like the Darker and Edgier example below, many of the non-original characters showing up in his videos are probably going to eventually end up playing a part in something way bloodier than they would in their own franchises.
- Darker and Edgier: A lot of the non-original characters that pop up in his works have more of an edge to them than they do in their original franchises.
- Gorn: If an injury could end up horrifically bloody, there’s a good chance it will be.
- Massive Multiplayer Crossover: The only thing stopping Moon from putting any character from any franchise he wants in his animations is wether he has a toy or figure of them or not.
- Off-the-Shelf FX: Both types of the trope (Kit-Bashing and Straight Out of the Box) are employed, with some of the toys being used in at least one video having been identified by viewers as happy meal toys from Mcdonalds (with a few modifications of course). The general rule of thumb seems to be whatever works well, works well enough, and there doesn’t really seem to be anything that Moon can’t make use of effectively.
- Percussive Maintenance: One video acting as a recreation for a video about the climatic scene of Joker (2019) except with Goofy and Winnie-the-Pooh as actors sees a brief scene where it’s revealed that Cecilla and Aloette are watching the movie and are frustrated at the screen displaying a technical difficulty message. Aloette solves the problem by hitting the TV.
- Production Posse: As noted above, Emirichu is often among the voice cast for his projects, as well as often providing the artwork/drawings in some of the videos for set pieces.
- Prop Recycling: When a figure or part of a set is still kicking around in his workshop after being used in one video, it will likely be reused in another at some point.
- Screwed by the Lawyers: Unfortunately Moon runs into this with his videos from time to time, often with copyright claims stemming from his use of certain characters figures from certain franchises. Specific instances can be found on the Trivia pages for their respective series.
- Stop Motion: The type of animations he makes.
- The Western: He’s a big fan of old westerns, and the influence can be seen in some of his character design choices & settings.
- Wild West Tropes: Likes to use tropes from the western genre in his longer running series.
