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You Don’t Know About Freaky-Ass Cartoons Until You’ve Watched “Zebra Face” Narrated By Jarvis Cocker

Episode 5 includes Roots Manuva as three ghosts who also happen to be MCs...

As you can tell from all the “speaky” bits in Pulp’s many albums, Jarvis Cocker has the kind of deep, soothing Northern tones that sound like they were built for the sole purpose of telling stories. Now, at long last, that talent is being put to proper use, because he is the narrator (and talking sunshine) in this trippy-as-hell but completely genius animation “Zebra Face”, which was created by two creative polymaths called Kid Acne and Supreme Vagabond Craftsman.

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Kid Acne essentially knows every single face in UK hip hop that ever lived and breathed, so there’s a bunch of voices in each episode that your ear would usually recognise from rapping, but instead they’re a freaky cartoon character. In Episode 5 (“Sneezy On the Mic”), which you can watch below, Roots Manuva plays three not-very-scary ghosts, who also happen to be MCs. It's worth watching just to hear Roots speak in abstract poetry, which appears on the screen in snot-green letters, like the kind of messed up, post-comedown lucid dreams you have on your first night back from Glastonbury.

The cartoon, which was first shown in 2012 on Channel 4, is now being made

available to watch on YouTube

, which is why I’m writing about it right now. Before then though, it existed in paper form as part of a comic book of the same name, which garnered cult status over the years for its sick pictures, surrealism and actual, belly-cramping hilariousness. There aren’t many words that can be used to explain it properly, so you should probably just spark a fat blunt and watch the whole thing below for yourself: