Administrators
2006 · 6m · Belgium
Directed by Roman Klochkov
Genres: animation, dark comedy, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, theatrical
When his house catches fire, Egor the rabbit runs to the administration for help, but without the right papers he is sent from office to office while the flames spread.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A talking rabbit drowning in Soviet bureaucracy while his house burns down—it's so perfectly perverse that it shouldn't work, and yet Klochkov commits to the absurdity without winking, which is exactly why it does. The fact that this isn't framed as tragedy but as inevitable, darkly comic inevitability is the kind of subversive premise that makes everyone else in the room uncomfortable.
Klochkov's animation operates in the tradition of Eastern European political satire—Kafka filtered through stop-motion specificity—with a theatrical formality that refuses to soften the bureaucratic nightmare at its core. The pacing and mise-en-scène locate this squarely in a lineage of absurdist animation that prizes ideological clarity over sentiment.
The crucial choice here is the constraint of the animation itself: every frame of that rabbit navigating these sterile offices costs time and precision, and Klochkov weaponizes that limitation to make the bureaucratic slowness feel genuinely suffocating. It's the decision to animate *every* rejected form, every redirected hallway, that transforms a concept into something that burns.
Reviews
Voici un petit court d'école tout simple et rigolo avec des allusions à la complexité de l'administration et au cinéma signé Roman Klochkov, un ancien élève de KASK. Après quelques sélections, le film a remporté plusieurs prix dans les festivals belges.