Albatross Soup
2018 · 7m · United States
Directed by Winnie Cheung
Genres: animation, documentary, mystery
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, surreal
Over 50 recorded participants try to solve a dark lateral-thinking riddle by asking only yes-or-no questions, while psychedelic animation visualizes their deductive reasoning.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Taking a parlor-game riddle and turning it into a document of collective reasoning filtered through lysergic visuals—that's the kind of "wait, WHAT?" premise that shouldn't work but does. Everyone else would call this a gimmick; Cheung makes it feel like anthropology.
The film sits interestingly between documentary rigor and surrealist formal play, though the psychedelic layer risks overwhelming the architecture of the riddle itself; the editing discipline is there, but the tradition it's in remains slippery.
The singular choice here is letting the animation *visualize* the logic of yes-no questions instead of just ornamenting them—that decision transforms what could be a talky experiment into something that *shows* how deduction actually feels.
Reviews
The mesmerizing animation is a visual representation of the riddle unraveling as we hear different questions and answers as to what's the real story. Not only is this short film entrancing to watch, it's also fascinating to try to solve the riddle with them, which is a bit tragic in the end.
Animation allowed us to explore the stream of consciousness quality of the voices. Working with Masa was a dream. His aesthetic is very dreamy and playful. The story and his style of art direction was the perfect match.