Jerry
Jerry is a 2007-2009 series by HotDiggedyDemon told over the course of 5 Flash shorts thematically centered around helplessness, poverty, and the inability of the characters to handle the world around them.
The first cartoon was about Jerry's life as a young bachelor, the monotony of his day-to-day life and the birth of his child. Two of the other shorts dealt with his childhood, and the other two with the people whose lives were affected by Jerry. All in no particular order.
Despite its crude animation and short running time, Jerry manages to weave a web of complicated, rounded characters and events.
The whole series is about a half hour and is available on YouTube here.
These are tropes.
- Anachronic Order
- Alcoholic Parent
- Arc Words: The final few sentences of The Shining are read by Jason to his son, and later to his grandson.
- Art Evolution: The animation becomes a lot smoother by the end.
- Black Comedy: Holy Sweet HELL.
- Book Ends: Jerry staring in to the moon in the original short. In the first shot, he's smiling. At the end, he's not.
- The first short ends with Jerry burning in Hell. The last one ends with him playing a harp in Heaven.
- Break the Cutie: The original short is about the weight of the world being too much for the sensitive, passive Jerry.
- Calling the Old Man Out: Junior breaking his grandfather's nose after comparing him to his father.
- Cerebus Syndrome: The series never become deadpan serious, but the earlier installments are lighter in tone, and by the last installment all the humor has been replaced by Jason's deliberately Dude, Not Funny snarks.
- Crapsack World: Everyone's unpleasant, selfish, perverse, and unhappy.
- Driven to Suicide: Our protagonist.
- Dysfunctional Family: Apparently, Jason ends up adopting Junior and letting his teenaged asian hooker move in with them.
- Gag Dub: sort of...
- Self-Parody: Apparently as an April Fools Joke.
- Grandparental Obliviousness: Junior sits in his grandfather's house for about two weeks without him noticing.
- Heroic Mime: Jerry and Jackie.
- Hilariously Abusive Childhood
- I Have No Son: Jason initially refuses to acknowledge that he ever had a son.
- Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Jackie.
- Luke You Are My Grandfather
- Overly Long Gag: The first short uses an incredible amount of repetition to emphasize the monotony of Jerry's life. It works well enough that many viewers get bored or frustrated, thus feeling Jerry's pain. Your Mileage May Vary on whether this is a good thing.
- Parental Issues: Jerry's dad Jason is basically a stupid guy with big dreams that never came to pass and has emotionally detached himself from the world. It also doesn't help that Jerry's mom died right in front of him and Jason blames him for it.
- Parental Neglect
- Sudden Downer Ending: The original short.
- Suddenly Voiced: Young Jerry in The End.
- Also adult Jerry in the noncanon, Seinfeld parody Jerry 2
- Why Couldn't You Be Different?: Jason's got this on a huge level for his meek son Jerry. He eventually gets along better with Junior since he's a vicious brat, differing him from his "loser" father.