Animation on the internet has a bit of a reputation for being excessive in it's depictions of sex, violence and questionable themes, but few creators make this as big a part of their overall aesthetic as Lee Hardcastle. Hardcastle is most notorious for his stop-motion parody of The Thing starring characters from Pingu, which the BBC tried to remove from the internet, forcing Hardcastle to remake the animation, this time with cats instead. Plastercine has a certain tangibility, other forms of 2D animation (which is the most commonly used medium for animation on the internet) simply do not. There is definitely something disturbing about seeing children's characters such as Pingu recreating scenes from John Carpenters The Thing, even is the blood and guts is just food colouring and plastercine.
Hardcastle, since posting this video on the internet has been commissioned to do work for Adult Swim, 20th Century Fox and Square Enix, but commercial work has not compromised his gorey, exploitation-film aesthetic and has since gone on to develop his own web series of Claycat film, television and game parodies. A lot of what Hardcastle does could be dismissed as crude, but there is a level of artistry to systematically constructing and creatively destructing one's characters in increasingly excessive and violent ways.
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