Mundo Canibal

» see mundocanibal.com.br as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Flash humor traveled in two ways. Either it had no words in it, in which case it went everywhere at once, or it was built on dialogue, in which case it stayed inside its own language and got enormous there without anybody outside noticing. Mundo Canibal is the second kind. It got big enough in Brazil to end up with a nightly slot on cable television, and in an internet cafe in Ankara nobody had ever heard the name.

It started as one character. Rodrigo Piologo drew Carlinhos in 1994 and put up a page for him on free hosting not long after. In 1998 the Piologo brothers joined forces with Rogério Vilela and the studio Fábrica de Quadrinhos, and the whole thing became Mundo Canibal.

The cast was the point. Carlinhos, Sr. Donizildo, Pastor Metralhadora, Chuq Nóia, a narrator called Treco who was drunk in every episode. The humor was dark in the way that only really works when everybody watching is fifteen, and characters died in it regularly. All of it was drawn in Macromedia Flash, on a schedule nobody sensible would have agreed to.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

By the late 2000s mundocanibal.com.br was not a cartoon page anymore. The front page carried games, downloads, photos, caricatures, interviews, an events calendar, a ranking, a shop and a licensing section. Loud and packed corner to corner, built for a fifteen-year-old on a school computer with eight minutes left on the clock. This was the Brazilian web at full volume, and it sits closer in spirit to a YouTube channel now than to anything an animation studio was doing then.

In early 2013 it went to television. Mundo Canibal TV ran weeknights at nine on Multishow, a paid channel, which is a long way from a free hosting subdirectory with one character on it. That was the peak, and it was also the last full year.

~ what came after ~

In 2014 the site was shut down. The explanation the brothers have given since is not dramatic: the partners went in different directions, so one partnership became two channels. Rogério Vilela kept the Mundo Canibal name. The Piologos took their own instead, and Irmãos Piologo is still working.

The domain took another three years to notice. Its last front page is frozen in October 2014, still pushing a trailer for a horror film about a ouija board and the second episode of Gotham, and the address went on serving that page until 2017 before it finally lapsed. The cartoons themselves never died: they are all on YouTube, which is where anyone who wanted them had already gone. What died is the site, and with it the idea that a group of animators needed one.

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