Philippa Rice is a UK cartoonist known for her utterly adorable and sweet comics, collected in such aptly named works as My Cardboard Life, Our Soppy Love Story: A Journal About Us and her recent Sister BFFs from Andrews & McMeel, Rice’s partner is cartoonist Luke Pearson, who is also known for adorable comics, including the Hilda series. Together they have an adorable toddler, and, well, it is soppy and adorable but somehow being upfront about it makes it all whimsical and sweet.
Rice and Pearson also dabbled in animation with “Soft Spot,” a collection of snippets of traditional animation, stop motion, and video. Most of them star Rice’s own knitted characters. Rice recently uploaded them to Vimeo to be enjoyed in High Def. Things start a little slow, so you might want to skip ahead to #5, which features a charming song called “We Like to Eat Human Meat.” It’s utteraly…adorable. And if you REALLY dig it, here’s the extended mix.
Watch below or click through for larger versions.
And I’m sad I didn’t discover this tune in time for the recent holiday season. We desperately need some new Christmas songs!
There are more videos on Rice’s Vimeo page, and her YouTube channel if you want to poke around. Given her success as a cartoonist – and Pearson’s with the Hilda cartoon on Netflix – these videos are more a lagniappe to their better known work, but if you need a few minutes break from reality to a world that is mostly all adorable (and who doesn’t?) checking these out may qualify as self-care.
Rice has a Soft Spot Patreon set up but admits they don’t have much time for animation now – however they plan to continue doing bits and bob here and there. To which I say thank goodness!
More of Rice’s work below.