The Bloke Who Animated the Apocalypse

Phoebe Robertson

When Charlie Faulks talks about animation, it’s with a kind of unstudied inevitability. “It was just always there,” he says. “I didn’t have to force myself to like it. It was just this passion that formed very quickly.”

That passion—half instinct, half obsession—led to Bloke of the Apocalypse, the animated series that snagged him NZ On Air funding at just twenty years old. “It was a strike of lightning,” he says. “Something that I was really passionate about, and the idea was very personal, but it was also very Kiwi.”

He describes meeting producers Ben Powdrell and Francesca Carney at a pitching festival in Wellington. “Everyone was in the same room,” he says. “It was very Wellington. We were all trying to make stuff.” They became collaborators, mentors, and eventually partners in turning his student project into a funded series. “It was the perfect mixture of the idea, and then them funnelling it into this proper pitch deck,” Charlie says. “Because I didn’t know how to appeal to funding bodies. I didn’t know the language.”

The series itself is simple enough: a father and son trying to survive an apocalypse. But underneath that, it’s a study of masculinity—the blokey, stoic, faintly absurd kind that defines so much of small-town New Zealand. “It’s based off the character of my dad,” Charlie says, “and the sort of macho bloke of New Zealand and the trappings of that stereotype.”

He laughs when I ask how it felt to put someone so close to him into an animation. “It makes it easier to write, because I know my dad so well. I know his demeanour, and the demeanour of that sort of person. I’m not trying to demoralise the folks—they’re great. They just have these hang ups about things, and they can be quite stubborn.” By the end of writing the show, he says, “I think I understood Dad a little bit more. That sounds corny, but it just made it so easy to write the character. The stereotypical macho bloke is just inherently funny—they’re so belligerent and casual about everything.”

When Charlie’s dad watched the first episode, he wasn’t there to see it. “Apparently he sort of welled up a little bit, which was quite sweet,” Charlie says. “Who knows if it’s true, but that’s what Mum said.”

The show’s origins stretch back to high school, where the concept began as a farm-set father–son story. The apocalypse came later, “something to really stress them out,” Charlie says. “To create this awful environment for them, to cause conflict, to make their different ideologies clash.”

The apocalypse also gave him an excuse to play. He and his flatmate Jack Marlin—who became the secret voice of Bloke—spent late nights working on the project in their student halls. “It was so much fun,” Charlie says. “Every choice seemed very natural, and it culminated in something that felt homegrown and fun.”

He still talks about that early process with the giddy affection of someone describing a first band or zine. “It’s always more fun to improvise,” he says. “Especially when you’re working with a friend and you’re very close and living together. It’s easy to build on each other’s ideas.” But he was serious, too. “I was really getting into writing at that time,” he says. “I wanted to write the scripts and even practice just the skill of writing and the structure of it.”

The funding came during his second year at Massey. “Third year really ramped up,” he says. “That made it quite tough to balance study and this sudden full-time job.” His lecturers were forgiving; he scrapped his original pilot project and turned his coursework into a research project about animation production. “It fit into the production itself, which was really lovely,” he says. “That third year went so quick. I kind of miss it now—the frenzy of everything going on.”

He remembers exactly where he was when the funding call came through. “I was still working at Three Wise Men at the Wellington Airport,” he says. “It was a Sunday, I’d gotten up at 5:30, and I was just sizing up suits for [clients] when Fran, my producer, called me. She took so long to get to the point. I was like, just tell me—and then we got it.” He laughs. “I had to suppress my excitement for the rest of the shift.”

Since then, Bloke of the Apocalypse has grown beyond his imagination. It premieres at the Terror-Fi Film Festival this month. “It’s pretty scary,” he admits. “But I’m really excited for the premiere.”

The show itself, he says, balances comedy, drama, and even horror. “That’s normally done in live action,” he says. “It was sort of a tall task to play around with that in animation. But I like shows that balance those tones.” He calls it “very comedy-forward,” with “jokes every ten seconds” but also moments “where you do see these characters crack.”

Animation, Charlie points out, is expensive—and misunderstood. “Even the style we’re working in is very rare to see in New Zealand,” he says. “This really unappealing, sort of Nickelodeon–Cartoon Network style. It’s nice to see animation stepping into people’s radar a little bit more.”

He grew up on Adventure Time, Regular Show, and a strange little series called The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack. “It was so weird,” he says, laughing. “I think that show had a specific bite to it. It’s bubbly one moment, then it cuts to this awful close-up of a guy with moles and hair sticking out everywhere. I like that. We’ve tried to do that in Bloke.”

As for what comes next, he’s cautious but hopeful. “Maybe this is the moment where I can be like—please, New Zealand, can we have another season?” he says. But in the meantime, he’s keeping busy. “We’re shooting a feature film right now—just me and my mates, very independent, no money behind it. It’s nice flipping between something big and public and something tiny that’s just ours.”

He shrugs when I ask if the publicity and funding pressure ever intimidated him. “I have so much faith in the project,” he says. “The only thing is just how publicised it was when we got it. The numbers between the budget and my age created a shocking headline.”

Still, he seems remarkably unshaken. “It’s got a sense of humour that will appeal to people,” he says. “It makes me laugh, and it makes the crew laugh, and that’s the best we can do.”

And maybe that’s the real secret behind Bloke of the Apocalypse: the end of the world isn’t scary when you’re laughing through it with your mates.

Bloke of the Apocalypse premiers at the Terror-Fi Film Festival in Wellington on the 30 November. The show will be released on YouTube Friday 31 October 2025. You can view it from the link here.