Ashes of Conviction
2025 · 2m
Directed by Yvonne Yiwen Su
Genres: animation, drama, historical
Tones: contemplative, dark
Burr tried to endure Hamilton, but they ended up with the most famous duel in history. The timeline was modified but I tried my best on following historical accuracy for the rest :( Directed and Animated by Yvonne Su Andrew Mouet as Aaron Burr Juan Sanchez as Alexander Hamilton
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A two-minute alternate-history animation of the Burr-Hamilton duel sounds like a premise designed to satisfy the Hamilton fandom, which is precisely why it doesn't interest me—Su's doing the most obvious thing with the most obvious source material, and contemplative dark tone can't hide that she's working in someone else's sandbox.
Su's restraint here is what lands: a 2-minute historical revision that respects the weight of the actual duel while interrogating it through animation's unique capacity for temporal collapse, the formal rigor of reducing a legend to its essential tragedy without melodrama.
The decision to animate this—to strip away the cultural noise around Hamilton the musical and return to the raw historical moment through hand-drawn form—is what makes it work; that formal choice alone transforms what could be trivia into something genuinely mournful and singular.