All the Rage
2014 · 1m · Canada
Directed by Alexandra Lemay
Genres: animation, dark comedy, satire
Tones: darkly comic, provocative, surreal
A mink enters a fur store in a stop-motion fable about consumer choices. Shopping habits trigger unsettling consequences.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A mink walking into its own potential death trap as consumer spectacle—it's the kind of premise that should be groan-worthy but lands like a gut punch. Lemay takes the fable form and weaponizes it, turning a 1-minute stop-motion gag into something genuinely unsettling about complicity.
The economy of form here is immaculate: stop-motion's inherent artificiality becomes the perfect register for satirizing the constructed desire of consumer culture. Lemay situates herself in a lineage of moral animation—think Švankmajer's ethical grotesquerie—but compresses it into something lean and formally precise.
The decision to make the mink simultaneously victim and mirror—we're watching our own shopping impulses reflected back—hinges on a single tonal pivot that Lemay nails in under sixty seconds. That moment of recognition is where the craft reveals itself: maximum impact, no wasted frame.