Faculty of Art

Experimental Animation

Allison Taylor

The Midnight Bakery

Dawn is a little girl who runs a fantastical bakery after bedtime. While she navigates rowdy customers and recipes, she must also face a persistent hint of danger that lurks in the dark just beyond the veneer of the bakery. Click the Camera Icon below to watch!

“The Midnight Bakery is a soft-horror piece that seeks to frighten the audience’s inner child. Through style, design and atmosphere, The Midnight Bakery utilizes various motifs of 2000s childhood sentimentality and that are both embraced and distorted to evoke an unsettling sense of intimacy I refer to as haunted nostalgia. Haunted nostalgia refers to the recollection of bittersweet memories from our past, that develop uncomfortable and sometimes dark undertones the more we investigate the memory. It follows a young girl named Dawn, who copes with her hard home life through the escapism of her imagination.Thematically, The Midnight Bakery incorporates visual and narrative elements reminiscent of children’s media from the 2000s, such as audience-directed shows like Dora the Explorer, Elmo, and Barney, and character design influences from Coraline and Sesame Street. The art style, particularly in the backgrounds, draws inspiration from Michael Martchenko’s illustrations in Robert Munsch books. The piece also taps into a subgenre of soft horror that distorts children’s media or places childlike motifs into darker, mature contexts, drawing from influences like Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, Creepypasta stories, and video games like Five Nights at Freddy's.Ultimately, The Midnight Bakery represents coping with childhood trauma through escapism while evoking the bittersweet longing for childhood memories that may not be as sweet or safe as they once seemed.”