The South Korean studio Studio Goindol has created a lovely series called Doggie Corgi, which they call ASMR animation. I discovered this mid November 2019, but they have been uploading these videoes for almost a year.
Their president Jeongsoo Hur tells Cartoon Brew this in an interview:
We wanted to give people this message: “It’s okay. You are doing good.” Life flies by faster and faster, and all of [us] are so tired to chase what is constantly changing and running away from us… The goal of the Doggie Corgi episodes [is] to have people to feel warmness and get comfortable while just gazing at the animated, slow, sentimental scenes in the middle of busy screens filled with flashy effects and edits wherever they go.
Below you can see some of these animations. They all last 30 minutes, and end on looping animations, meaning you can have them on for hours on end. The channel mentiones this is because they want the viewer to be able to watch this and relax for as long as they need.
Our original purpose is to provide a relaxing background music for people to just let it play accompanied by soothing animation… As the episodes got shown to people around, we received feedback that they want to hear what’s going on in the scene as well. So, we wanted to provide a real delicate ambient sound of the scene.
Frankly speaking, [our soundtracks are] not really an ASMR content, but more like an ambient sound. But ASMR’s definition in [the] content-consuming world constantly evolves and people start to view highly sensible audio content as ASMR. We haven’t talked to the “real” ASMR people yet, but if changes and equipments allow, we would try something really meaningful as ASMR content.
This reminds me a lot of a piece I made as my final piece on my Bachelor, called Life is a Collection of Eternal Waiting and its copiece All things Come to Those who wait.
Life is a Collection of Eternal Waiting
All things come to those who wait
Studio Goindol refers to their work as ASMR, but I see them as a version of the slice of life genre. They don't have a plot, but they tell a story. They show scenes of a life, specifically a Corgi's life.
Studio Goindols work inspires me to create relaxing images with the intent to warm you, unlike my older pieces Life is a Collection of Eternal Waiting and All things come to those who wait which are a tad more negative. They are about depression and being alone. I think looking back at these pieces is very crucial at this point, especially considering my work on The Philbert Project.
We all have stress and tension in our lives that we need to relieve, and I can see that Studio Goindol is trying to relieve some of that, which I find very remarkable.
Studio Goindols work inspires me to create a new animation, featuring Philbert and friends, but I am not sure when I would have time to do so. It would definitely have to be after the Retrieval Process, but it is in my future plans.
Another noteworthy artist doing a similar thing as Studio Goindol is doing with Doggie Corgi.
I stumbled on this video by a happy accident 20th October, and absolutely love the ambience it has. The animation is subtle but beautiful, and truly inspiring. It also has frogs, and you know how I feel about those. This artist has not posted anything similar to this piece, and says it was just a project done for fun. I do hope they create more in this manner. It has the slice of life feeling I adore, and it feels very organic.
When I do create an animation piece, I also want to create some simple music for it. I bought a keytar for this purpose recently, and I am trying to find the time to learn how to play it. I know nothing about music, so that is a big task, but I am very conviced I can achieve this. I might just be overly confident.