Astigmatismo
2013 · 4m · España
Directed by Nicolai Troshinsky
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, surreal, whimsical
After losing his glasses, a boy can focus on only one thing at a time and is drawn by surrounding sounds through an unfocused world of unknown places and strange characters.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise wants to be profound—loss of focus as metaphor for childhood wonder—but it settles into whimsy instead of genuinely upending it; a film that's too polite for its own conceptual audacity.
Troshinsky locates himself in a lineage of Eastern European animation—Svankmajer's tactile surrealism, Norstein's elliptical storytelling—and the formal restraint of tracking focus through sound design rather than exposition shows real curatorial awareness of the form's traditions.
The decision to make sound the primary narrator while vision remains fractured is what elevates this—most films would literalize the astigmatism through visual distortion, but holding the image coherent while the soundscape does all the narrative work is the elegant constraint that makes four minutes feel complete.