AWN’s latest survey highlights a selection of under-the-radar animated shorts currently making their way through the festival circuit — or newly available online.
This month’s lineup showcases some new films hitting the screens at Zagreb and Annecy along with a few just beginning their festival life. We’ve got works about ovaries, circuses, idiots, mothers, cakes, war, and brutal dictatorships.
Life with an Idiot by Theodore Ushev, France
After a recent foray into live-action, animation maestro Theodore Ushev returns with a Kafka‑tinged tragicomedy adapted by Ushev and his daughter Alexandra from Victor Erofeyev’s story. Dominique Pinon lends a weary, end‑of‑the‑world fatigue to Vladimir, a twice‑widowed everyman summoned by authorities. They decree he must atone for his unremarkable life by choosing an “idiot” to share his home — an arrangement that predictably spirals into absurd conflict.
Set to a screeching opera vocal, the film’s fluid watercolor on paper and jittery, hand‑painted brushstrokes — recalling Koji Yamamura’s A Country Doctor — mirror Vladimir’s unstable grip on reality and the encroaching madness of his world. Ushev’s whirlwind of collapsing frames and restless color shifts ranks among his most unsettling work, leaving us to ponder: in a life ruled by spectacle and complacency, who is the real idiot?
The Mustached Clown Circus by Ana Comes, Tomás Alzogaray Vanella, and Paz Bloj, Argentina
While many North American and European indie animators continue along well-trodden paths — often introspectively unpacking personal ailments, traumas, and stigmas — other artists, particularly in the Middle East and Latin America, have turned their gaze outward. In regions scarred by war, corruption, and pervasive violence, social anxiety or one's place on the spectrum tends to fade in urgency. Survival becomes the priority.
The Mustached Clown Circus is initially told from a child’s perspective, illustrated through chaotic scribbles and collage-like fragments from a child’s notebook. The story begins on the day the circus came to town. The child remembers costumes, salutes, shoes, and stars. Then came the mustached magicians — illusionists who made people disappear.
In a world that seemed full of magic, the population slowly became captive, terrorized under the spell of a military dictatorship. It becomes increasingly clear that the people are no longer spectators but the caged animals, and the mustached magicians are their ruthless trainers.
Using raw, unfiltered language and a visually wild palette of rough drawings, home movies, and collage, the film hauntingly revisits Argentina’s last military dictatorship through the lens of a child’s fractured memory.
Still Moving by Rui Ting Ji, Canada
After a divorce, a mother drives a moving van with her daughter in the passenger seat. There’s a tense stillness between them — most thoughts stay unspoken, and the words that are spoken feel surface-level, a way of skimming over the deeper pain and the uncertain road ahead. The rain gets heavier. So do their moods.
The film’s framing, design, and animation all reflect the internal storm the mother is navigating. Meanwhile, the daughter, confused and growing angrier, can’t quite grasp what’s happened. When she finally lashes out, the mother cracks.
Still Moving is a powerful, deeply personal piece about the emotional fallout of divorce — about fear, confusion, and anger, and how those things simmer under silence. What’s striking is how little the father is mentioned. We don’t know what he did. Was it violence? Boredom? Cheating? It almost doesn’t matter. What matters is that this is where the mother and daughter are now — on the road, going somewhere. Uncertain. But still together.
Ovary-Acting by Ida Melum, Norway/Sweden/UK
The fertility clock is ticking for a young-ish woman at her sister’s latest baby shower. Babies. Mothers. Newborn-shaped cupcakes. A judgmental grandmother. “Freeze your eggs,” suggests a well-meaning friend. The pressure is relentless.
Overwhelmed, Eva escapes to the bathroom with searing stomach pain. Crumpled on the floor, she suddenly finds herself face to face with Ovy — her baby-loving, opinionated reproductive system.
Mortified, Eva tries to flee, but Ovy follows her into the world beyond the bathroom, convinced it’s time for a baby. What unfolds is a surreal journey — not just in search of a potential partner or child, but of understanding. Ovy is all instinct and urgency, while Eva wrestles with deep uncertainty about motherhood, timing, and the kind of world she’d be bringing a child into.
Told through tender stop-motion with comic — and musical — flourishes, Ovary-Acting explores big themes: aging, choice, conception, and the lifelong commitment to a future that may never go to plan. Through confrontation and companionship, Eva and Ovy slowly begin to hear each other, allowing Eva, at last, to speak her truth.
Kyiv Cake by Mykyta Lyskov, Ukraine/Estonia
The creator of the cult favorite Deep Love (2019) is back with another trippy little tour through Ukrainian society. It opens with a hilariously surreal image: a deer trotting (and singing) along to what sounds like some 1990s dance hit I definitely missed hearing in the actual 1990s because I was… never mind. Focus. Back here. Mr. Writer.
We meet a man lying next to his wife. He’s waking up, turning the power on, already wrestling with that money-sucking electricity meter. While brushing his teeth, this toothpaste — suddenly in the colors of the Russian flag — comes oozing out. He brushes anyway, and immediately a tooth falls out. There’s a child. This is a poor family. The fridge is basically empty, except for a box of Kyiv Cake. But inside that box? A Ukrainian passport.
The wife gets up and sees her husband by the window — now featuring the body of a bird. The baby’s crying. The man flies off. The woman gets up. The boy grows. And just as daily life seems like it can’t get any harder… a missile hits their building. Defiant and heartbroken, the boy shouts those now-iconic words from Snake Island: “Russian warship, go fuck yourself!”
It’s no surprise that Lyskov is working with an Estonian studio — there’s something in the tone and texture of Kyiv Cake that echoes classic Estonian animation: surreal, layered, symbolic. The kind of work that once slipped truths past Soviet censors. But beyond style, there’s a shared spirit between Ukraine and Estonia — a kind of dark absurdism, a refusal to give in, a strange pride in being stubbornly, uniquely themselves.
Still, Kyiv Cake is raw, anxious, angry — and ultimately about finding something possible inside the impossible, the bearable within the unbearable.
A well-known figure in the world of independent animation, writer, author & curator Chris Robinson is the Artistic Director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival.
