A few years ago, I accidentally discovered an incredibly beautiful, yet obscure art series called "Canterlot Royal Ballet Academy". The series is ostensibly an MLP fan series, but in my opinion, it's so unique that it's basically original in everything but the character names. The series is an about anthropomorphic ponies in a ballet academy (as the title suggests).
I don't know exactly what it is about it, but the series just has this amazing and surreal aura around it that I've never seen anything quite like before. When I first saw the series, I had an incredibly surreal experience that lasted almost a whole day. I first found it late at night. At first I thought it was very strange, but that feeling quickly melted away into pure admiration for it. I experienced a beautiful trance where I became fixated on it. I experienced a very surreal and ethereal feeling I can't quite describe, and I also experienced a very sweet phantom smell.
The following morning, I thought it was a dream, and was very pleasantly surprised to discover that it was actually real. The rest of that day, the feeling only got more and more intense, and the whole day felt like a daydream. It only subsided towards the end of the day.
Whenever I look at it, I get this very strange feeling as if it is something that you shouldn't be able to see or even be able to imagine in real life. Like something from a magical dream that was somehow transported to reality. Without requiring any backstory, I can picture the whole series perfectly as if it was real. Not like I'm coming up with one myself - but that it feels like there's one intrinsic to it. I can picture this very dream-like incoherence, with an ephemeral innocence to it. I can picture exactly what the voices for each of the characters should sound like. Ethereal voices that feel timeless and that don't originate from any particular place, yet also feel very intimate.
I've been obsessed with CRBA for years now. I've scoured the internet for every single mention of it, and have been disappointed to find out just how little it has been noticed. It seems like everyone who finds out about thinks it's amazing, yet somehow it has gotten very little recognition. I'm also impressed with just how quickly AVCHonline improved his artistic talent. In just a few years, he went from very crude drawings of cartoons to the height of the CRBA series. Yet his early art still got more attention than his later work.
I've made it my mission to make people find out about it and (hopefully) experience the same amazing feelings that I did, so I've created a website to catalog all of the artwork in one place (and in the highest quality). Prior to this, it was scattered in many places across the internet, much of it only in low resolution.
I've also created an imageboard for it.
The main site is here:
https://crba.dedyn.ioThe imageboard is here:
https://ib.crba.dedyn.ioFor an introduction to CRBA, I recommend starting with the AcademyLIVE sub-series:
https://www.deviantart.com/avchonline/art/AcademyLIVE-Season-01-Trixie-Maud-on-the-bridge-630016849For the absolute peak of it (all of CRBA is amazing, but I think this one in particular is probably the most detailed and stunning):
https://crba.dedyn.io/?id=88I also recommend checking out his music and animations for the CRBA series here:
https://crba.dedyn.io/video