An MS Paint ranger returns in Lesbian Dogwood Part 2

dd o0 bentl's Lesbian Dogwood and the Disaster Life Thereof is a feature-length film drawn in MS Paint and cut in Adobe Premiere. It follows lesbian dogwood, "a nomadic homunculus ranger," through the wastelands of a dystopia called neo Kansas City 2. Part 2, about 30 more minutes, has its world premiere at the Nightshades Experimental Animation Festival at Charlotte Street's Stern Theater in Kansas City on Nov. 13 and 14, with Part 1 screening ahead of it.

Part 1 came out in January 2023 and runs 34 minutes. In bentl's own summary, lesbian dogwood makes friends, barely survives, and "nothing really important happens." The cast comes from bentl's circle: Janet Francine Shay plays lesbian dogwood, Sonja Larsson plays fishbaby#359478100, and Grant Duffrin plays God, with bentl voicing the rest. The new teaser runs its title cards through a glitching desktop window, the File, Edit and View menus still sitting on top of the frame.

Both parts belong to THIS IS MY DISASTER, a multimedia anthology of videos and comics that bentl has been building since 2020 out of an unfinished book. bentl lives in Chicago and, by the artist's own account, emotionally in Kansas City, and started out making cartoons in MS Paint and Windows Movie Maker as a kid. The catalog also includes koopalovr plays: super mario 64 episode 30 (2021), a seven-minute short built in the shape of a let's play, about a despondent cat mourning something lost.

Nightshades is a free screening of experimental animation by and for Kansas City animators, organized by Nora Snyder and hosted by Charlotte Street. Its open call asked artists from Kansas or Missouri for work using techniques "beyond what is considered 'industry standard,'" and ruled out AI. bentl knows the format from the other side, running the free-submission Smash Yr Fingers video events in Chicago and serving as showrunner for the online BEAF Experimental Animation Festival. Admission is free.