The creator of Pepe the Frog — the comic character that became an alt-right-troll meme — attempts to reclaim his creation in the new trailer for Feels Good Man, a documentary about cartoonist Matt Furie and the unintentional evolution of his anthropomorphized amphibian.
In the trailer for the Sundance award-winning film, Furie’s beloved “happy little frog” is co-opted by white-supremacy groups, which the cartoonist helplessly witnesses. “I’m just a spectator to how things evolved on the internet,” Furie says in the preview.
“In November 2016, a nasty election cycle had exposed a seismic cultural rift, and the country suddenly felt like a much different place. For underground cartoonist Matt Furie, that sensation was even more surreal. Furie’s comic creation Pepe the Frog, conceived more than a decade earlier as a laid-back humanoid amphibian, had unwittingly become a grotesque political pawn,” the documentary’s synopsis states. “Feels Good Man is a Frankenstein-meets-Alice in Wonderland journey of an artist battling to regain control of his creation while confronting a disturbing cast of characters who have their own peculiar attachments to Pepe.”
The Arthur Jones-directed doc arrives on September 4th.