Matt Braly Unveils The Gothic World Of ‘Clara And The Below’ At Animation Is Film (EXCLUSIVE)

Six months after successfully crowdfunding his independent animated series Clara and the Below on Kickstarter, Amphibia creator Matt Braly revealed the first work-in-progress footage at the 2026 Animation Is Film Festival in Hollywood.

Cartoon Brew is exclusively sharing all the still artwork from that presentation, including detailed backgrounds, art director Britney Thoreson’s color script, and character turns by lead character designer Ken Basca.

Braly described Clara and the Below as a dialogue-free, gothic interpretation of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker short story — “Toy Story meets Bloodborne.” Each night, Clara and her nutcracker friend Chompers venture beneath her family home into the Below, battling spirits as she seeks a cure for her dying father.

“As she kills these spirits, she comes to understand that these are the ghosts of the men that her father has killed on the battlefield,” Braly explained. “So the story really is about Clara becoming aware of the kind of man her father really is, and it’s creating an ethical dilemma.”

The footage depicted part of Clara’s midnight ritual: she wakes in her childhood bedroom, dons her blue duster, takes up her sword, and enters the fireplace to descend into the Below. Helping her are an assortment of period-appropriate toys, including a stuffed elephant, wooden creatures, and Chompers.

The sequence used a temporary track of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker ballet score, which Braly said would be “reinterpreted and re-recorded” by composer TJ Hill (Amphibia).

The Above And The Below

Thoreson presented her color script for the series’ full arc, with environments that recall Scott Wills’ backgrounds for Samurai Jack.

“When I was talking with Matt early in development, we knew we’re gonna make a horror series together, which is something that’s been on my personal bucket list for a long time,” Thoreson said. “I love everything about horror.”

Her color script helps establish how characters read against their surroundings, especially in moments of danger.

“We’re asking the big questions of, like, how is a character getting lit?” she said. “I personally see it as a problem-solving tool. And yes, I’m thinking about color but I’m mainly thinking about value; that’s something I feel like a lot of color scripts tend to leave out a lot of the time. I want Clara to really stand out in moments where she needs to fight for her life, and in really high emotional stakes.”

Thoreson described a stark visual contrast between Clara’s home and the landscapes of the Below, pitting dark interiors against an unexpectedly bright underground world.

“We’re in a horror series here, so something that I will always go back to are values,” she explained. “If we want this to feel pretty jarring, this is the medium to do it. So if we’re gonna start off with a really dark interior at the beginning of the shot in the beginning of the series, the natural opposite is to go almost as bright as possible.”

That brightness is part of what makes the Below unsettling.

“The below is quite literally below a house, and it’s overcast, and it’s kind of daytime, and there’s a whole ass forest; it’s very odd. It’s very strange.”

A Silent Hill-like atmosphere permeates the landscape, where fog obscures potential threats.

“This might sound a little crazy, but I find this place to be beautiful and haunting,” Thoreson said. “There’s not a lot that grows here, so how are we gonna add so much separation, so much depth to it? When Clara’s walking around, the one thing that makes the fog so scary is you have to get close to the thing that you’re walking towards, and by that time it’s like, is this thing I’m walking towards going to kill me?”

“I don’t know,” she added, laughing. “That’s the beauty of it, and that’s the anticipation of it all.”

Getting Clara Just Right

Basca discussed finding the right visual tone for Clara, building on preliminary designs by Remus Buznea and Kyriaki Kyriakou.

“I’ve always been really inspired by comics, and early on, part of what really got me excited about the project was actually all of the preliminary design work by Remus and Kiki, who are incredible designers, and had this comic book-inspired style,” he said.

“So, Clara has this extra sharpness to her design, and these sort of inky lines inspired by comic book inking,” Basca continued. “What I really wanted to add to her is a bit of anatomy to ground her. So, she has these forearms that are slightly defined.”

He cited Teen Titans as a reference for the definition in Clara’s forearms and hands, giving her stylized design enough anatomical grounding to support the action.

“It really suits the action because this is a character that is going into the Below. She’s fighting monsters, she’s getting into these intense situations, and we wanted that to feel real,” he said. “The design is stylized while still reflecting that grounded little bit of anatomy that we wanted her to have.”

By contrast, the creatures Clara fights rely on distorted proportions and shape language to create an unsettling effect.

“The [ghouls] have a more unnatural version of the human proportions,” Basca explained. “Like this ghoul that you see Clara fight has elongated forearms with big bony elbow bones, and because it’s so different from this baseline that we’ve set you really believe in the unnatural, freaky quality of it.”

Braly said an official teaser for Clara and the Below would arrive in January, with full episodes releasing in 2027. The fourth and final chapter remains unfunded, and he is weighing his options for financing it.

“I don’t know that I would do Kickstarter again because there were a number of pitfalls and lessons learned that if I were to do it again, obviously I would be smarter about it,” he said. “But I would love to try and get that funding, whether we’re selling merchandise or we’re finding some kind of sugar daddy,” he joked.