Jelly: An Urban Fairytale by Robin Budd is a 13-minute animated short film released in 2023 that was produced by the Canadian animation studio Nelvana, famous for creating tons of beloved Canadian cartoons, like Babar, Little Bear, the original Clone High, and Detentionaire. The film was directed by Canadian animator and Nelvana veteran Robin Budd, best known work for his work directing for Ruby Gloom and the Beetlejuice animated series.

The film's protagonist is a young artist named Molly. Molly lives in an apartment where she spends her spare time working on art. However, Molly never gets much done at her studio, because her time is more spent at her 9-to-5 job painting faces on mannequins at a factory assembly line. With the mind-numbing exhaustion of her job and bosses who don't approve of having their mannequins look anything except like every other dummy they make, Molly doesn't exactly get much opportunity to exercise her creative juices. Until one evening, after another grueling day of uninspiring work, Molly returns home to encounter the titular Jelly, a strange gelatinous creature with amazing powers. This curious but friendly blob of goo quickly helps Molly to rediscover what she can truly do with her artistry and soon takes her on the adventure of a lifetime.

Jelly is Nelvana's second ever animated short film following 2019's The Most Magnificent Thing and the first to be an entirely original production rather than an Animated Adaptation of a children's book (although both feature similar themes). Both works also mark Nelvana's return to producing proper animated films after the Box-Office Bomb of the feature-length Rock & Rule back in 1983.

Jelly made its debut at the 2023 Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal, Canada. It would eventually come to television too, being shown on Cartoon Network Canada (formerly known as Teletoon) on October 2024 and becoming the first animated short film to appear on the former Teletoon since the channel's earliest days, when it also showed shorts by the National Film Board of Canada. You can watch it for yourself for free on Robin Budd's website. Check it out here!

Tropes:

• All There in the Manual: Due to the lack of dialogue in the short, Molly and Jelly's names are only confirmed in external sources.
• Apothecary Alligator: A variation. A bizarre crocodile-centipede creature can be seen dangling from the ceiling of Molly's studio as one of many strange artifacts she apparently has for artistic inspiration. Jelly tries to imitate it for fun when it first sees it, to Molly's delight.
• Auto-Kitchen: Variation. After work, Molly goes to a small stall that automatically produces a pizza (complete with the box) for her.
• Bad Boss: Molly's bosses at the Happy Mannequins factory are strict and cold at best, and outright cruel at worst. They force her to work long, thankless hours doing soul-crushing menial tasks and actively discourage her from exercising any creativity with her job.
• Bittersweet Ending: Molly's new friend dies, but with its Heroic Sacrifice, Molly's Bad Boss is dead and she regains the artistic inspiration long snuffed from her to pursue a new career painting murals.
• Blob Monster: Jelly is a living mass of ink-like substance that is able to do nearly anything. It starts off as being no larger than a rat, but after Molly feeds it, it becomes large enough for Molly to ride on.
• Central Theme: According to Robin Budd himself, that would be the importance of pursuing one's creative passions. Molly's soul-sucking factory job is the antithesis of everything she desires to be as an artist, and her friendship with Jelly helps to rejuvenate her desire to make art, his Heroic Sacrifice freeing Molly from her job and letting her follow a new career as a street artist.
• Cyber Cyclops: The One-Winged Angel form of Molly's Bad Boss has a massive green mechanical eye it fires destructive electrical beams from.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Molly has pale skin, raven hair, and (judging by some of the stuff in her studio) an interest in the macabre, while Jelly is a living mass of inky darkness, but both are benevolent souls.
• Deliberately Monochrome: The vast majority of the short is done in a monochrome saturation to emphasize the bland and conforming nature of Molly's life and world. This is averted at the climax of the film when Molly and Jelly confront her former boss and remains after Jelly's Heroic Sacrifice allow her to rediscover her passion.
• Deranged Animation: The film can definitely delve into this territory, especially at the climax, where things go from being fairly grounded if slightly cartoonish to purely fantastical and utterly surreal. The short isn't labelled "An Urban Fairy Tale" for nothing!
• Dingy Trainside Apartment: Molly lives in one. It makes her attempts to pursue artistry in her spare time even more difficult, as the trains disrupt her concentration, further demotivating her artistic pursuits.
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Molly is a slim young woman with long black hair and pale skin. And she seems to have an eerie side if some of the things decorating her studio are anything to go by.
• Elemental Shapeshifter: A comedic example. As a quick visual gag, Molly turns into water in frustration over her attempts to make a sculpture of a splash of water not working out. It's not meant to be a special supernatural power she possesses, but more of a humorous representation of her despair over her artistic demotivation (and as a foreshadowing of Jelly's arrival); her water form even initially resembles the splash she's trying to sculpt before collapsing into a puddle. She quickly reforms when her phone starts buzzing.
• Flight: Jelly is able to fly despite not having wings or forming them when it does so.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The arrival of Jelly is alluded in the beginning scene of the short with Molly's efforts to sculpt a statue of a splash of water.
    • The clay she uses the same color as Jelly and is being used to create a representation of something amorphous.
    • Molly's frustration causing her to transform into water mimics Jelly's shapeshifting powers.
    • A pair of eyes suddenly forms on Molly's drawing of the splash and watches her scramble to get ready for work.
  • Similarly, the more out-there nature of the climax compared to the rest of the short is not only foreshadowed by Molly's one-off transformation into water, but also her Imagine Spot of her bosses as bug monsters, showing that while the story may seem grounded at first (shapeshifting blob creature aside), it is most certainly not going to be stuck within the confines of reality.
• Four Eyes, Zero Soul: Molly's supervisor has thick square glasses that obscure his eyes, but is every bit as sinister as Molly's Bad Boss, whom he reports Molly to for her brief burst of creative inspiration.
• Heroic Sacrifice: To destroy the One-Winged Angel form of Molly's boss, Jelly encases itself around its head to clog its laser, destroying both of them.
• Imagine Spot: Molly has a brief one where she envisions her boss and supervisor as giant half-human, half-insect monsters and the factory she works at as a giant garbage dump.
• Lightning Can Do Anything: Jelly was created by a lightning bolt striking the assembly line at the mannequin factory where Molly works.
• Medium Blending: Most of the short is animated using Toon Boom, but several shots incorporate CGI.
• Mime and Music-Only Cartoon: There is no dialogue for the entirety of the 13-minute short. The characters can be heard Speaking Simlish in a few scenes (provided by Bryn McAuley), but everything in the story is conveyed through the visuals and music.
• Murderous Mannequin: Mannequins are cast in a wholly negative light in the film, being used as symbols of conformism and creative stifling. Molly's day job is painting the exact same face on every mannequin made in the factory she works at (with said mannequins all designed to look like her Bad Boss), and at the climax, her Bad Boss transforms into a gigantic mannequin monster to battle Jelly. There's also Molly's arrival at the factory after-hours, where it turns out all the crazy dummies she made for fun at work are actually quite scary-looking when one is alone in a factory at night.
• Nightmarish Factory: The ironically-named Happy Mannequin factory, a place of grim, cheerless, soul-crushing conformism and creative stifling, and Molly just happens to work there. And it most definitely becomes this at the climax.
• No Name Given: Asides from Molly, none of the characters are named.
• One-Winged Angel: At the film's climax, Molly's boss transforms from a cruel old hag to a half-octopus, half-medusa creature that Jelly defeats by transforming her into a baby. However, it doesn't last long, as she then transforms into a titanic mannequin with a hole in its head from which a cybernetic eye fires lasers.
• Speaking Simlish: Jellybefriended by Molly speaks in this, and Molly herself can be heard speaking in some when she tries calling for help after first meeting it.
• Spit Take: Molly does one when a coworker gives her some coffee that's a little too hot for her tongue. Said spit take ends up splattering over a mannequin head she was working on, creating an amusing face-like appearance that briefly inspires her to try some more wacky faces on the mannequins, to the displeasure of her supervisor.
• Urban Fantasy: Or "Urban Fairy Tale", as the film subtitles itself. The story is set in an entirely mundane world and seems quite normal on the surface, but as it progresses, things get increasingly fantastical and bizarre, culminating in the surreal nature of the climactic confrontation.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Jelly can contort its body into all kinds of forms.
• White Hair, Black Heart: Molly's boss has white hair, and is a heartless Bad Boss who despises creativity and nonconformity.