A cero
2014 · 12m · España
Directed by Mina Trapp
Genres: animation, dark comedy, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
A plague of lice threatens to leave a population bald; as a preventive measure, the authorities oblige citizens to submit to strict haircuts, but what should be a temporary effort ends up becoming a routine, people have lost the right to keep their hair and the measures are increasingly strict, and only the hairdressers take advantage of the situation, opening branches of hairdressers everywhere; meanwhile, everyone wonders: when will the plague arrive? An intrepid carrier pigeon will put her feathers at stake to discover what happens behind this hairy affair.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A carrier pigeon as resistance hero in an animated lice-panic allegory that refuses to explain itself—this is exactly the kind of premise that makes consensus programmers nervous, and it's precisely why it works. Trapp takes the absurdist bureaucracy playbook and deranges it just enough to feel genuinely unsettling rather than polite.
The film's lineage traces back to Švankmajer and Eastern European animation's tradition of political allegory through the grotesque, and Trapp executes that formal vocabulary with considerable restraint—the haircut sequences carry their weight through composition rather than commentary.
The decision to center a pigeon's investigation as the narrative anchor transforms what could've been a straightforward satirical essay into something with actual dramatic momentum; it's a small tonal choice that makes the surrealism feel earned rather than performative.