Superbly demonstrated in an octet of animated films as part of this year’s 2026 Sundance short film program, a viewer should never underestimate the emotional power that can be expressed through animation.
The films comprised a first-class cinematic tasting menu.The opener, 1981, rightly tickled the audience. This naughty and very witty death-of-innocence story, inspired by a true event that happened in 1981, is about a suburban Long Island 14-year-old boy who gets quite the surprise birthday gift from his parents. To say more would spoil the ending.
Courtesy of Sundance Institute.
Animators Andy London and Carolyn London are well-known on the festival circuit and their technical approach spotlights the nostalgic and memory feel one might have from the 1980s but without all of the details necessarily being there. In an interview with Rotoscopers, the Londons explained their approach which started with “pencil testing.” Andy added, “I found old office paper for collaging in the backgrounds and did tons of research at vintage shops and took many photographs and tried to emulate that time period and step back into it. That’s how it was for me.” Meanwhile, Carolyn said the approach focused on the question of how do you conjure up a memory?” She added, “And those memories are watercolory. They’re kind of ambiguous. They have a lot of emotional color, but they don’t always have a lot of detail.”
With a dramatic shift in tone, Rami Jarboui’s The Birds of Placebo, magnificently rendered and indicative of Tunisia’s rising star in cinematic animation, is a spiritual contemplation about migration and the barriers that stymies one’s efforts to realize their dreams. A young depressed, wheelchair-bound Tunisian man dreams of traveling but he also feels hopelessly stuck. His father is in prison while his mother worked hard in providing for the family. The young man sells marijuana but one of his customers who doesn’t have cash on hand offers him a rare bird in trade. The young man ends up in an accident, but is reincarnated as this rare bird and embarks on an incredible journey.
Courtesy of Sundance Institute.
About portraying the young man as wheelchair-bound, Jarboui said in an interview with Rotoscopers, the character was inspired by people he met several years ago when he was working on a documentary. He recalled how one young disabled man lamented that his condition restricted him from living his dream of traveling. At the time of the encounter which came after a revolution in Tunisia, Jarboui recalled how the young man felt the experience was a metaphor, adding it felt like the country is stuck and wants to develop and find new hopes for the young people.”
While Jarboui, who had studied animation in school, has directed short live action films, The Birds of Placebo marks his formal debut in animation. In that same interview, he explained that he wanted to capitalize on fusing animation’s opportunities for creative freedom and the emotional punch of live action cinema. “And so we brought them and we filmed on a green screen,” he explained. “Yeah, all the scenes and then everything was added. The background, the location, the bird, the 3-D. So only the faces and like you said, the eye, everything that was real. And then we added everything in 3-D and 2-D. And I think that also helps to give a very specific look for the film.”
The next two courses offered good counterpoints. The first was warm-hearted, in Nicolas Fong’s psychedelic-rich Hugs, with cuddles galore. This was followed by themes of grief, restless spirits, and haunting memories of a man who lives alone in a forest, in Sorrow Doesn’t Sleep at Night by Josefina Montino and Martín André.
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
With animation that imitates a child’s drawings, Grace An’s Cabbage Daddy is a splendid contemplation about a bilingual kid’s tendency to misinterpret something when communicating with their parents in their native language (in this case, Korean). An used crayons for her initial sketches, but then, as she explained in an interview with Rotoscopers, “when I scanned all my drawings … I found that crayons were actually not as saturated. So I did use pastels in certain scenes just to get it to pop out a little bit more.”
The bonus in Cabbage Daddy is the appearance of sporadic human character designs which don’t match up but all have the same bowl haircuts. This aspect was not initially intended because An didn’t conceive a specific narrative. As she explained in the interview, “But when I was in pre-production, I didn’t think I needed character designs because I thought, ‘Well, there’s not going to be that many characters. It’s not really going to be as figurative as it turned out.’ But as I was working, I was like, ‘Oh, there are quite a few characters, and it’s not really cohesive because I was just animating sporadically.’”
Already in the midst of a solid festival circuit run, Busy Bodies by Kate Renshaw-Lewis is a miniature masterpiece of genius hand-drawn animation about the step-by-step industrial process of manufacturing. According to a Montclair, New Jersey newspaper feature, Renshaw-Lewis was inspired by a “made by hand” sticker on a tuna sandwich she purchased for lunch at a grocery store. In images that resemble those in a Dr. Seuss book, tiny green creatures who wear red cone hats are putting lemons into a system of red tubes while other production lines, working step by step, eventually assemble packaged cubes of fish. It took about a year to complete the entire animation process.
In the same newspaper interview, Renshaw-Lewis said, “I love the look, especially when you can really feel the texture of the piece, especially because the main reason I love animation is it’s completely limitless, in my opinion.” Like the other films, Busy Bodies exemplifies animation’s expressive stretch. “You can make anything happen. And because of that, I like to dive a little bit more into the surreal,” she added. “And I think having that tactile quality helps ground the film, so that even if you’re going into very metaphysical, absurd worlds, if you can still feel that it’s on a sheet of paper and you could touch it, it makes you feel connected to these very out-there ideas.”
From Taqqut Productions Inc., an Inuit-owned film production company located in Iqaluit, Nunavut, Mangittatuarjuk, the Gnawer of Rocks, by Louise Flaherty, is a striking animation piece with horror overtones. It has already received several awards at film festivals in Canada, as well as honors for best screenplay and best art direction at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.
Mangittatuarjuk is a fearsome creature from Inuit folklore and the story into Les two girls who are curious about collecting stories even as they wander farther and farther away from the camp on the Arctic tundra. In a cave, they encounter the ‘gnawer of rocks’ and they realIe that they will have to outsmart the creature if they are to survive.
There could not have been a more fitting closing short in the program than with Paper Trail by one of animation’s most influential and distinguished creators, Don Hertzfeldt. He is also the only filmmaker to have won Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize for Short Film twice. Winning this year a Sundance Short Film Special Jury Award for Creative Vision, Paper Trail is a quintessential Hertzfeldt piece. The premise is elegant and simple: an individual’s life is chronicled from his first attempts at using crayons on paper and we see his life through school papers and eventually the documents he approves as a clerk. Another Hertzfeldt short, Rejected, which premiered at Sundance 25 years ago returns in an anniversary program retrospective.