Credited cast: | |||
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Matt Furie | ... | Self - Artist, Creator of Pepe the Frog |
Rest of cast listed alphabetically: | |||
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Robert Barnes | ... | Self - Attorney, InfoWars (archive footage) |
Samantha Bee | ... | Self - Full Frontal With Samantha Bee (archive footage) | |
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Jeremy Blackburn | ... | Self |
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Susan Blackmore | ... | Self - Psychologist and Memetist |
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Matt Braynard | ... | Self - Executive Director, Look Ahead America |
Hillary Clinton | ... | Self (archive footage) | |
Stephen Colbert | ... | Self (archive footage) | |
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Joel Finkelstein | ... | Self - Director, Network Contagion Research Institute |
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Ursala Furie | ... | Self |
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Nicolette Gray | ... | Self (archive footage) |
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John Michael Greer | ... | Self - Occultist and Scholar |
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Lisa Hanawalt | ... | Self - Artist and Writer |
Emily Heller | ... | Self - Comedian and TV writer | |
Alex Jones | ... | Self - Host, InfoWars (archive footage) |
Artist Matt Furie, creator of the comic character Pepe the Frog, begins an uphill battle to take back his iconic cartoon image from those who used it for their own purposes.
I'd heard a lot of good things about this film after its premiere, with the added assurance that, yes, it is a documentary about Pepe the frog and yet it's still really good, so I was expecting something interesting.
And I still finished it thinking it was so much better than a film about Pepe the frog has any right to be. It's a film about symbolism, psychology, the internet, the death of the author, meme culture, all while maintaining a sense of grim disgust but still being funny, optimistic by the end, an interesting character study about a modern day tortured artist, AND never once feels the least bit cringey even though it's about meme culture, which is an extreme rarity in a world where most films centering around the internet are produced by out of touch 60 year old boomers.
Not a word of the script feels wasted, the choice to animate Pepe in various ways illustrating the voice over was genius, and every one of the people it looks at are all really interesting.
The few things I could maybe complain about are that the soundtrack wasn't all that great to me and the last 20 minutes or so feel a bit slower than the rest of the film, and not really in a good way. However, if you have even a passing presence or space of your own on the internet, this is an absolute must-see.
Even if it is a documentary about Pepe the bloody frog.