Imagine two frogs. Now imagine those frogs in a high-stakes diamond heist, corporate backstabbing, and a descent into cinematic absurdity. That’s Jimmy and Baby, directed by Paul Robertson. In twenty minutes of pixel-animated intensity, Robertson and co-writer Michelle Larney send you off the rails in the most joyful way.
Rodent-eyes or frog-eyes, it doesn’t matter—you get pulled in by the sheer delight of the visuals. The director’s game-art aesthetic comes alive: chunky pixels, hyper-color palettes, ridiculous motion blur, smears of animation that feel slapped on like a thrill-ride. Jimmy and Baby uses that retro-game sensibility to do something far more wild than nostalgia: it becomes a full-on G-rated-turned-R-toned fantasy, complete with riffing on mob tropes and hellish landscapes.
The plot: Jimmy and Baby work for Frog Mafia. They’re sent to rob a diamond. The heist goes sideways. They end up in Hell. And it only gets crazier from there. The tone swings from slapstick to surreal to genuinely disorienting. What I found so magnetic is how the film uses its very pixel architecture to amplify dislocation. The animation becomes a metaphor for meltdown—when a character leaps, you sense the weight of gravity bending. When bullets fly, the frames stretch and tear like reality glitching.
Robertson has cited influences like Chuck Jones and Satoshi Kon, but here he synthesizes them into a garish, 8-bit fever dream where even the design of the villains feels like a level boss you refuse to believe you have to fight. Scenes where frogs drink whiskey, fly on jets, and browse diamond prices on digital boards—it’s manic. But under the hyper-violence and cartoon absurdity, there’s a human pulse: ambition, greed, identity, and chaos all mixed.
Animation students: take notes. Jimmy and Baby isn’t just about drawing well—it’s about embracing dysfunction. The animation is deliberate, agonized, precise. The sound design creaks. The comedy hits. And yet it never forgets that the frogs are doing something dumb because they want something big—and they might pay for it.
When you finish watching, you might blink, think: “That was insane.” And you’d be right. But it sticks. You’ll remember the jump-cut to Hell, the pixel-rain of coins, the frogs screaming, the diamond spinning down a drain. That’s the mark of something fearless.
If you’ve got twenty minutes and a tolerance for joyful chaos, press play on Jimmy and Baby. Let it drag you into its world, and when it ends, you’ll see your day-to-day with slightly crazier eyes.
