Watch the Trailer (click here)

See Ledo and Ix on Wholphin

 

In many ways, Ledo and Ix are just like us. Sleeping under the stars makes them philosophical. Sometimes they wonder if they should have chosen different careers. They avoid dens of monsters when possible. But in one crucial way, they're different--they're fantasy adventurers in an extremely small-scale video game epic.

What exactly do video game characters do when we're not around? What if they chat and bicker like we do, wonder and dream like we do, feel boredom and dread like we do, despite being 48 pixels tall? A sort of eight-bit tribute to Waiting for Godot, The Adventures of Ledo and Ix uses the visual vocabulary of retro video games to explore the human fear of both the unknown and the known.

Credits

Written and Animated By
Original Music By
Additional Sound Design By
          

Emily Carmichael
Andrea Mazzariello
Laura Sinnott

"Hypersuspance" (Space Theme)
crickets
chimny fire
wind
wind 1
brook
ambient pajaritus
danish forest
bush
sword

suonho
eric5335
reinsamba
ERH
Anton
acclivity
melack
gim audio
schademans
hello flowers

Director’s Statement by Emily Carmichael

For a long time I'd been thinking about the video games of my childhood and how they created incredibly engaging story lines and profound character empathy using only a minimum of character animation. In Final Fantasy IV, for instance, characters could only face left, right, forward and back, put their heads down and die (unless they were engaged in a fight sequence, when they could also cast spells and turn into frogs.) But in context, even the simple gesture of a tiny character putting his head down was an unmistakably legible emotional cue.

The interface between the epic and the everyday is one of my most lasting fascinations, so I decided to give my adventurers modern dialogue and recognizable concerns. I wanted to explore how they experienced the predicament--constant travail in quest of a goal that's never fully explained--and how, in their own different ways, they might long for something else.