Anti Wizards
2021 · 12m
Directed by Áron Siegler
Genres: animation, comedy, fantasy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
In a world where everyone has magical abilities, the powerless exceptions — the anti-wizards — live on their own floating island, where their clumsy therapy sessions may decide the island's fate.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
The inversion is *chef's kiss* — a world where powerlessness is the exile, where the disabled are quarantined on a floating island and their therapy sessions carry apocalyptic weight. Siegler's doing the rare thing: taking a concept that could be inspiration-porn dreck and making it genuinely, darkly absurd.
The animation carries a formal restraint that grounds the surrealism; there's a lineage here to absurdist theater and mid-century satirical animation that the craft honors without genuflecting. The pacing of those therapy sequences—measured, uncomfortable, deliberate—suggests a filmmaker thinking carefully about how form reinforces the island's claustrophobia.
The decision to make the 'powerless' the protagonists of their own dramatic weight—rather than side characters or inspiration beats—is the hinge the whole film turns on, and Siegler commits to it without winking; that tonal confidence on a 12-minute budget is what lifts this from concept into something that actually lands.
Reviews
Áron Siegler's Anti Wizards is a comedy that hinges on its self-awareness and irony. The absurdity of the humour of Anti Wizards is a showcase of real world bad faith politics, peddles a perverse kind of fun, a faithful legatee of Adult Swim, joyfully frolicking in the waters of chaos and anti-catharsis.