The Best Video Essays of 2021
Posted 24 Dec 2021
Possibly the most fascinating and vivid new art form of our time, nearly everyone I know under the age of 40 watches video essays on at least a semi-regular basis. The best of them are as well-made, sophisticated, interesting, and insightful as anything that might get nominated for established awards. Yet so far there’s been very little recognition of the form outside of the potent enthusiasm of its audience. So I thought it might be fun to compile a list of some of the video essays that I most enjoyed this year. This is not a ranking, nor is it an award, nor is it comprehensive. Consider it a list of recommendations.
I’ve also made a YouTube playlist for your convenience.
Internet culture
- What The Internet Did to Garfield by Super Eyepatch Wolf. Why is the internet fixated on the Fat Cat? And why does that fixation so often manifest in dark and grim ways? An excellent look at the history of online Garfield fandom, participatory art, and the surprising themes of Jim Davis’s own creation.
- The Lost Film About Internet Memes by Lady Emily. What happened when a bunch of then-popular internet personalities decided to make a feature film about themselves? Not a whole lot, apparently.
- “Michaelsoft Binbows” isn’t what you think by Nick Robinson. The surprisingly heartwarming story of one man’s search for the origin of a silly picture he saw on the internet once.
The Ballad of Doug Walker
There was a lot of good discussion this year about my favorite disgraced Internet celebrity, Doug “The Nostalgia Critic” Walker. Full playlist here.
- The Failure of Channel Awesome’s Demo Reel by Lady Emily. In which Doug attempts to start a new career as the show runner of a serial comedy-drama and creates something truly bizarre and awful.
- The Nostalgia Critic and The Wall by Folding Ideas. In which Doug attempts to write a love letter to Pink Floyd’s The Wall and accidentally creates a feature-length mockery of it.
- The Review Must Go On - Doug Walker’s Haunting Masterpiece by Diregentleman. In which Doug attempts to quit his job and fails.
- Doug Walker’s “The Review Must Go On” Sucks, Too by droowpy. In which Doug’s adventures in the previous essay require even further exploration.
- Nostalgia Critic Reviews AREN’T Reviews by Bright Side Euan. In which Doug attempts film criticism, and creates a legacy of bad film criticism in his wake.
Video games
- Exposing Fraud and Deception in the Retro Video Game Market by Karl Jobst. An infuriating and thorough look at the world of vintage video game collecting that details the wide-ranging grift of the collecting world in general.
- How Cities: Skylines Makes You Plan Bad Cities by Pres. I’ve enjoyed this game but like most city-builder games, the cities it encourages you to build are not necessarily cities that would be good places in real life. And Here’s Why.
- Unboxing the hidden politics of SimCity by Polygon. Even more discussion of the subtexts of city-builder games!
- How Videogames Make The Ultimate Sacrifice by Adam Millard. An overview of the use of sacrifice as a gameplay mechanic.
- Should Games Be Frustrating? by Razbuten.
- Open-World Games Are A Mess by yakkocmn. I have a lot of complaints about video games in general, and this video felt like I could have written it myself.
- Designing Dark Souls Easy Mode by Darkfry. Dark Souls, the game best-known for being intentionally difficult to play, is here the subject of an interesting question: how could you make Dark Souls easy while staying true to its intent?
- The Game Prototype That Had To Be Banned By Its Own Studio by People Make Games. An interesting story about a game idea that proved to be a kind of psychological hazard.
- Just how bad is The Combine? by Leadhead. I played Half-Life 2 but somehow I missed a lot of the backstory nuance that is explained in this video. And you probably did, too.
- The Hidden Game Within Microsoft Flight Simulator by Writing on Games. The strange beauty of playing MS Flight Sim wrong.
Urban Planning
- Why City Design is Important (And Why I Hate Houston) by Not Just Bikes. A good overview of concepts of good city design through the lens of Houston getting it wrong.
- The Ugly, Dangerous, and Inefficient Stroads by Not Just Bikes. Learn what those horrible big-box shopping districts are actually called, and why they’re a blight.
- The HyperPort is Dumb and Will Most Likely Explode A snarky takedown of an Elon-Musk-esque “disruption” technology for cargo terminals.
Film and Televison
- That Time A Dollar Store Made a Game Show by Lady Emily. Did you know Family Dollar once made its own branded game show? They did! And here is more information about it than anyone in their right mind ever wanted to know.
- The “Reality TV Chronicles” by We’re in Hell. A rich and surprising exploration of the context and subtexts of some of recent memory’s weirdest reality shows.
- Love Never Dies: A Magnificent Trashfire Sequel to Phantom of the Opera by Lindsay Ellis. If you’re reading this at all then I don’t imagine Lindsay Ellis needs further explanation.
- Love Island: A Flirtation With Surveillance by Broey Deschanel. In case you needed even more videos about surveillance in the context of dating shows.
- Point Break and the Soft Masculinity of Action Movies by Broey Deschanel.
- An Exhaustive History of Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings by Folding Ideas.
- Stripping the Layers of Sensual Dancing in Film by Broey Deschanel. OK, if you learn anything from my list it’s that Broey Deschanel is probably the best video essayist writing about film right now. Just go watch one of her videos, they’re all good.
- The Problem of Method Acting by Broey Deschanel.
- The “Saurian Cinema” series by coldcrashpictures. A great series presenting various perspectives on dinosaur movies. Not dissimilar to Lindsay Ellis’s Transformers series from several years ago. The first two technically came out in 2020, but who’s counting.
- The bizarre world of fan edits and restorations by The Royal Ocean Film Society. The Phantom Menace without Jar-Jar Binks and The Thief and the Cobbler are just the beginning.
- Stock Music and Reality TV: How to Misrepresent the World by Tantacrul. Reality TV was a big topic in video essaying this year, wasn’t it? This one is specifically about how these shows use music to create narratives that may not actually exist.
- Capitalism, Poverty, and Ratatouille by The Sin Squad. All about Ratatouille’s strange obsession with theft as the ultimate crime. Technically came out before 2021, but only by a day so I’ll allow it.
The Sia Saga
The most fascinating and horrifying event in 2021 cinema was the release of the ill-advised autism film “Music”, created by ostensibly famous musician Sia. (Had you heard of her before this debacle? Because I hadn’t.) I can’t remember which of the many videos about it that I watched was best, so here are a couple different ones.
- Sia’s Movie: Another Autistic’s Response Because Y’all Won’t Listen by tianoso.
- Sia’s Music: The Trap of Symbolic Autistic Representation by Jessie Gender.
Computers and Programming
- The REAL Story on Why Space Cadet Pinball Was Removed by NCommander. Why did Microsoft remove Space Cadet Pinball from Windows? And why did they lie about it? And can we get it to run on a modern OS?
- A Brief Introduction to Esoteric Programming Languages by Hillel Wayne. The art and science of weird, incredibly specific programming languages.
- kkrieger: Making an Impossible FPS by Nostalgia Nerd. How a team of very smart people packed an entire 3D game into 96KB.
- The Typographic Legacy of Microsoft by Linus Boman. From Arial and Georgia to Trebuchet and Comic Sans, Microsoft’s typography has become as pervasive as plastic in today’s world. This is a great overview of the typefaces Microsoft has created and their outsize influence on graphic design.
- Bliss - The Story of Windows XP’s Famous Default Wallpaper by Michael MJD. A surprisingly touching and heartfelt homage to the history and legacy of the green hills that appeared in (arguably) the most famous photograph of all time.
Miscellaneous
- White Trash and The Politics of Food by Zoe Bee. The sociology of “trashy” foods and what they mean.
- Vaccines: A Measured Response by hbomberguy. If you’ve been watching video essays for a while, then you know hbomberguy is a name to wait for with giddy anticipation. He did not disappoint with this year’s epic, which is the most detailed and bizarre history of antivax progenitor Andrew Wakefield and his legacy that I’ve seen so far.
- Why No One Wins the Fast Fashion Debate by Broey Deschanel. The social and economical implications of Fast Fashion explored from a variety of angles.
- Disney’s FastPass: A Complicated History by Defunctland. An hour and forty minute history of how Disney has tried to mitigate queueing by experimenting with their ticketing systems. The most arcane topic imaginable, but also one of the most strangely fascinating videos of the year.
- Doomed to Obscurity by Solar Sands. What happens to things that are forgotten by history? Strange, chilling, and poetic.
- What Other Countries Are Told is “American” by J.J. McCullough. The weird world of “American-style” foods that you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere in America. (You’d be hard-pressed to find an American even willing to eat them, probably.)
- Beauty is a Scam by Mia Mulder. A nuanced look at the complicated world of professional modeling and the beauty industry.
- Male Dating & Sex Struggles: A Problem in Plain Sight by Macabre Storytelling.
- A Thousand Ways of Seeing a Forest by Jacob Geller.