Cyberninja

🎈 外伝 CYBERNINJA (pronounced balloon gaiden cyberninja) is an upcoming (🤞) short web series about a young man named Superninja searching for his path in a world of crushing existential uncertainty.

Superninja is a simple balloon with a crudely drawn face (or rather a crudely drawn ninja mask). He has been learning the ancient art of ninjutsu on account of this sounding pretty cool. Being chronically online he has had plenty of experience as a keyboard warrior and sees himself as a valorous protector of the common man (and especially woman). By day he works a dead-end job as a pizza delivery driver. Corporations exploit him as his debts pile up from online subscriptions he forgot to cancel.

While he questions his life choices, he is confronted with the possibility that he might be living inside a computer simulation. After all how else could a literal balloon be sentient in the first place? Trapped in a web of existential delusions he has to fight his way through armies of violent conspiracy theorists, debt collectors, street gangs, cultists and four dark lords from a realm beyond. Luckily he also makes a few new friends.

All aforementioned friends and foes are also balloons, by the way.

A season’s worth of story outlines is on the table, but the series is designed as a “we’ll see as we go” process. Initial episodes will function more as standalone short films.

All characters are CGI animated, superimposed on crude live action footage. Preference for the shot-on-phone “augmented reality” aesthetic has its productional reasons (it allows for rapid lightweight guerilla shooting) but also reflects Superninja’s experience within the story. He is an ephemeral digital ghost in a harsh lower class environment. The flashy visual fantasy language of 3D action games is contrasted with the raw grainy documentary clips of real life in an urban environment.

A balloon's consciousness gets uploaded to the cloud. In cyberspace, he tries to earn an honest living while beating up criminals and dealing with the existential dread of being nothing more than a balloon: a thin, fragile veil of rubber, expanded into three dimensional space by pure emptiness.