Paul Robertson (born 1979) is an Australian animator known for his complex pixelized, video game-inspired art style. He did indeed start as an artist and animator for several video game companies, while still making quite a few surreal animations and short films to be used as music videos or showed at animation festivals.
He became a well-known name among the gaming community after working as the art director for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game, and then outside the community for providing the animations of two characters from Gravity Falls: Rumble McSkirmish and Giffany (notice a pattern here?). Since then, his unique style has been spotted in several places including the retro-flavored games by Tribute Games, the Couch Gag from the "My Fare Lady" episode of The Simpsons and several promos appearing on [adult swim].
Potential seizure warning: Shifting colourful lights are often present within his animated artwork.
Not to be confused with Robert Paulson, or Rob Paulsen, or Paul Robesonnote
Works by him with pages on TV Tropes:
Tropes found in his body of work:
- Alliance of Alternates: His "Jerryfest
" has several alternate Jerry Smiths attending the titular event at a theme park. - Animated Music Video: He made a few of these:
- "Do the Whirlwind" by Architecture In Helsinki.
- "White Flag" by Delta Heavy.
- Animesque: His works are influenced by anime aesthetic and tropes, the older ones even more so. Also, blatantly parodied with Gravity Falls' Giffany, who comes from a supposedly haunted Japanese Dating Sim.
- Anti-Climax: His animations have the tendency to either have a flashy finale or just end abruptly with no real resolution.
- Author Appeal: Puppies, kittens, curvy and bouncy girls, weird monsters and mutants, gorn, and psychedelic imagery.
- Bird People: "Bird Jerry" lays an egg at Jerryfest. Bird versions of Summer and Morty hatch out of it and Bird Jerry regurgitates food for them.
- Body Horror: His animation skills sometimes are used to portray some truly grotesque transformations.
- Chest Burster: His "Dogs" short parodies the Trope Namer with a dog bursting out of a guy's chest.
- Continuity Nod: Sometimes characters from earlier works re-appear years later in unrelated works. The most interesting example is probably the Violence Kings from Kings of Power who became bosses in Mercenary Kings.
- Cute Slime Mook: Dragon Quest style Slimes appear in his art occasionally.
- Deadly Game: "Slime and Girls Gameshow" has a woman cutting herself open with a dagger, spraying blood and intestines everywhere and one of the contestants has part of her head missing, exposing her brain.
- Deliberately Monochrome: Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006 is all in black & white.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: One of his very first short films, Hyper Parsnip Bitches (2001), is the only one to have the characters fully voiced. The mock-Japanese and mock-Scottish accents he gave them become grating fast, though, so he wisely decided to just let the images speak for themselves for all his subsequent works.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006. It's an animation made to look a side-scrolling beat-em-up where the players have to fight against a pirate baby, and it was made in 2006.
- Flying Car: The Jerries attend Jerryfest in flying versions of his Ford Squire Wagon.
- Gorn: Several of his animations feature characters getting splattered, sliced, beheaded, ripped apart and so on.
- The worst offender is probably the final part of Kings of Power, where the gorn even gets weaponized.
- Elvis & Dimmi depicts the massacre of an innocent goblin village by the hands of the titular elf and dwarf in "lovely" detail.
- Kaiju: The protagonist of Super Dino Boys is one of these.
- Lighter and Softer: The Magic Touch contains no objectionable elements and has a very relaxed, chill-out atmosphere.
- Mind Screw: It's hard to say what some of his animations mean, if anything. But they sure are incredibly cool.
- Nested Mouths: His "Cats" short had a Xenomorph with a cat coming out of its mouth instead of another mouth.
- Reference Overdosed: Almost all of his works are loaded with references and cameos by popular culture characters, especially from games, anime and cartoons.
- Role-Playing Game 'Verse: The setting of the Elvis & Dimmi animation.
- Serial Escalation: This Adult Swim promo, a Pokemon-esque battle between Rick and Morty involving two Mr. Meeseeks. It starts with punches and broken bottles, and then...
- Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: A sexier version pops out of a TV, doing a peace sign in "Ham's Galley".
- Vomit Indiscretion Shot: "Slime and Girls Gameshow" has a woman doing a huge spray of vomit with slimes in it.
