After losing their job, an amusement park mascot actor struggles to cope with reality.
Pretty Kitty is an original mixed media animated short film that was made over the course of a year by 9 very talented and sleep-deprived animation majors, telling the story of the recently shutdown theme park Pretty Kitty's Playland and a man who wore the mascot suit of the eponymous pink cat mascot. As he prepares to leave the suit behind, he gets a surprise visit from a big pink friend...
Tropes
- Amusement Park of Doom: Pretty Kitty Playland is mentioned to be extremely dangerous on several occasions. The inciting incident that causes the park to be closed down is someone somehow getting decapitated by the Ferris Wheel, and Kasey strongly believes the roller coaster would have been "the next lawsuit" if the park had somehow managed to stay open despite of that.
- Body Horror: Kasey has a mental breakdown and hallucinates that the Pretty Kitty suit is tearing it's way out of his flesh, which then gives him the "idea" of straight up stitching his entire body into the real Pretty Kitty suit for his first day at his new job.
- Chekhov's Gun: Just as he's about to put the suit away, Kasey notices the head has a tear in it and pulls out a sewing needle to fix it. In the ending, the needle ends up becoming just what Kasey needs to become "pretty like Kitty"...
- Cute Kitten: Cruelly subverted...
- Downer Ending: Kasey completely loses his sanity and decides to stitch his entire body into the Pretty Kitty suit for his "first day" at his new job.
- Mascot: The titular Pretty Kitty, a talking pink cat that acted as the face for an amusement park.
- Medium Blending: Most of the animation is in 2D but some other art styles show up in Kasey's hallucination: from photo cutouts of children's faces to represent Pretty Kitty's fans to the cat himself getting shown as things like a 3D model or a sock puppet.
- Psycho Pink: Kasey's mental version of the titular pink cat is overly eager to get Kasey to keep being Kitty. Getting into Kasey's personal space and gaslighting him into thinking he's worthless anywhere else is what Kitty does when they're being nice, and when Kasey tries to reject Kitty, they only get worse.
- It's pretty like kitty!
