A Story About Pepe The Frog

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On one level, the 90-minute documentary is about California cartoonist Matt Furie and his globally known creation, Pepe the Frog. The benign, chillaxin’ character was plucked more than a decade ago from the relative obscurity of the Myspace-sprung slacker-life comic “Boy’s Club” and transmogrified into a meme by 4chan users and others and cribbed by pop singers — before swimming into the sociopolitical mainstream in 2016 as a symbol co-opted by the alt-right and shared on social media by the campaigning Trump family.

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First-time director Arthur Jones calls his movie a case study into what occurred optically during the 2016 election, told through the prism of “how a joke on 4chan became this larger story about how trolling moved off message boards and into mainstream Republican politics.” By October of that year, Donald Trump Jr. proudly posted to Instagram a “Deplorables” image featuring Pepe with Trumpian hair.

“Now, four years later, a joke that started on 4chan is moving into mainstream politics again, but it’s not about trolling — it’s about misinformation,” Jones said by Zoom from Los Angeles. “So this story might seem silly … but it’s actually something that still has a lot of cultural potency.”

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