Caitlin McCarthy’s sweet stories (where everything goes wrong) will have you in stitches

There are many reasons to fall for the works of animator Caitlin McCarthy, and Caitlin herself to be honest. Executed in a unique colour palette which shouts absolute joy and silliness, if you were to view stills of her works, you’d be forgiven for thinking she’s the sweetest gal in the world. But when their full narratives are revealed, Caitlin’s dark humour hits you – just as a slimy, gross boy might enter the frame and cause everything to go terribly wrong. There’s so much more to Caitlin than meets the eye, and what’s revealed has audiences, us included, hooked.

Caitlin is a self-described loser: “This is me! I am a loser!” she says, between laughing, in a saccharinely sweet voice she tends to put on when describing her work, often making fun of herself. It’s this quality of the animator – an ability to look at herself and laugh – which runs through her works, giving them a real honesty.

Often personal in their narrative, Caitlin’s animations are equal measures the results of illustrative talent and quick wit; developed in particular from her vast list of references, whether it’s a boy she fancies with good eyebrows, growing up hooked on Internet forums or the lighters available in a particular corner shop in Peckham Rye. To give you a sense of the work she creates, when Caitlin’s mum showed her most successful film to date to her gran – Coldsore, a Vimeo Staff Picked and, most recently, a SXSW selected short – “the one thing she said was ‘why did she have to do that?’”

Born and raised in London, becoming an animator was a bit of an accident for Caitlin. Always interested in creating some kind of visual work, she studied a foundation at Camberwell College of Art and ended up staying on at the university for a degree in illustration. At the time, “I was just doing dumb, weird shit” and “was like, cool, I’ll probably work in a cafe for the rest of my life?” That was until she had a coffee with Kitty Turley, an executive producer at Strange Beast: “You know when you email someone and you’re like ‘can you have a coffee with me and tell me how to live my life’,” and Kitty sort of did.

Followed by a series of commissions – MTV, Nike and The School of Life are all clients of Caitlin’s – then came Lite Me Up, made for Adult Swim on the theme of fire. Centred around the aforementioned inspiration of Rye Express’ “selection of sexy lady lighters – I love them,” the film continued with a teenage thematic narrative, inspired, like Coldsore, by Caitlin’s time on Internet forums. “I think it’s just stuff from being on the internet so much as a teenager,” she elaborates. “It’s also kind of when you have your most intense emotions and obsessions. Everything gets a bit boring when you’re older, you’re never interested in things as much as you are when you’re a teenager, and pre-ten-years-old all you’re doing is eating Potato Smilies.”

One particular obsession of Caitlin’s as a teenager was incels, “which stands for involuntarily celibate” she explains, “just extremely depressed, usually quite horrible, young men who hate women because they won’t sex with them.” An arguably unlikely source of inspiration for an animation, it was a Vice documentary from a few years back which provided a surprise main character for Caitlin. “It’s about one particular incel and I really fancied him,” she says with a little cackle. “It’s based on him because I fancy him. I don’t think he’d care, because he is a terrible person, he just has nice eyebrows and smokes loads of cigarettes. That’s where that came from.” This character then provided a possible narrative where the boy falls in love with the lady gracing this lighter’s wrapper: “I thought it was quite an incel-y thing to do,” she points out, “to fall in love with a woman who doesn’t exist.”

Caitlin’s process, too, is pretty unconventional considering she’s self-taught – an element of her work she’s finding hard to replicate when it comes to directing: “To be honest, I do prefer doing things myself,” she admits. “It’s great when people can animate with me, because I’m not actually a very good animator. I do things in specific, weird or wrong ways, and it’s really hard to communicate that with people who are actually really good at what they do. It’s often me saying ‘can you make it a bit shitter’.”

With a tone of voice now fully defined, it’s funny to think that Caitlin really had no plans to enter this industry which appears to suit her so well. Animation is not an easy one to get your teeth stuck into, it’s undeniably one of the technically hardest creative skills to finesse to a high standard, and each project takes a long, long time. But for Caitlin, “sometimes the repetitiveness is quite nice… I think that having a pragmatic task at all times, for me at least, works,” she explains. “Once you’ve done a really simple animation, you just colour in for a few days. But none of the process is enjoyable,” she points out before the conversation gets too serious. “No, okay, a lot of animators will agree that the process is not that enjoyable, but it is when you finish something and you get a bit of a high. It’s a race to having something there. It is boring. I do love it though.”

Looking towards the future, keen viewers can expect much of the brilliant same from Caitlin and her introspective, hilarious works. In her own words: “It’s always along the theme of something vaguely romantic, and then it ends badly,” she explains. “All my films follow the same basic premise that there is an obsession, and it all ends terribly, terribly wrong.” This is the same for the future films the animator has written, but not fully made yet. For instance, “I’ve written a whole bowling film,” she says as our conversation draws to a close. “Well, it’s only partly about bowling, it’s mainly about boys being boring. It’s about a girl who works in a bowling alley and she gets obsessed with one of the boys who comes into bowl. It all ends badly! She makes a voodoo sex doll of him. Yes. Then gets upset for one reason or another…”

Always self deprecating in the descriptions of her work, but in a way that is heartwarmingly affable, even when describing the insane achievement of getting Coldsore into SXSW she downplays it: “I’m gonna go on a big holiday to Texas,” she tells us excitingly, and boy does she deserve it.

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