Unfortunately for Matt Furie, his prized creation, Pepe the Frog, no longer stands for the silly, hopeful meaning he intended. Back in 2016, during the ridiculous US Presidential Election, the image of Pepe the Frog was turned into a symbol of hate. And now, the underground artist aims to take his creation back from the bigots and use it for love, as seen in “Feels Good Man.”
In the trailer for the upcoming documentary, “Feels Good Man,” we are introduced to Matt Furie, an underground cartoonist that just wanted to spread positivity using his beloved character Pepe the Frog. However, he found himself embattled in a legal battle to take on the trolls on the Internet that took his character and turned Pepe into a symbol of hate and intolerance. But now, Furie is fighting back.
“Feels Good Man” debuted at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (oh man, do you remember festivals!?). And in our review, we called the film “an intriguing look behind an online curtain that rarely gets pulled back, and is investigated critically even more infrequently. Slick animation graphics and well-paced interview testimonials bolster the effort and paint a very clear (if regrettable) picture of how art can sometimes get away from the artist.”
“Feels Good Man” arrives on September 4, but it’s unclear if it will be a theatrical release or VOD.
Here’s the synopsis:
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. 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. Now, as Pepe continues to morph around the world – FEELS GOOD MAN offers a vivid, moving portrait of one man, one frog, and the very strange reality we’ve all found ourselves living in.