Accidents, Blunders and Calamities
2014 · 5m · New Zealand
Genres: animation, dark comedy, family
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, whimsical
A father opossum tells his children a bedtime story about the most dangerous animal of all: the human. A catalogue of accidental animal deaths — drownings, asphyxiations, crushings — unfolds, each more horrible than the last.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A bedtime story told by a father opossum cataloguing human-caused animal deaths to his children—it's simultaneously a kids' film and a nihilist manifesto, the kind of premise that makes you laugh and recoil at once. This is exactly the stuff that gets passed over as 'too weird' and then becomes the short everyone's talking about.
The film understands its lineage in darkly comic fables and animated allegory, executing a deceptively formal structure where each vignette functions as a nested narrative within the bedtime story frame. There's real craft in the restraint—the horror is implied, not shown, which places it squarely in a tradition of sophisticated children's work that respects the viewer's imagination.
The singular choice here is the opossum narrator's tone—deadpan, affectionate, almost conversational while describing grotesque accidents—which transforms what could be gratuitous into something genuinely unsettling and oddly tender. That vocal performance decision, that particular register of dark comedy, is what makes this work on such a small scale.
Reviews
Ce court métrage à la fois drôle, efficace et très réaliste, est porté par une animation et un sens du détail parfait !