At Home with Mrs. Hen
2006 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Tali
Genres: animation, comedy, family
A mother hen contends with her chick's relentless tantrums and schemes to steer the unruly youngster toward better behaviour.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A seven-minute animated riff on parental authority that could've been a greeting card but sidesteps the obvious—there's something genuinely unsettling about watching maternal control play out through a hen's increasingly elaborate counteroffensives, and that tonal weirdness is exactly why it works.
Tali's piece sits comfortably in the tradition of anthropomorphic comedy-of-manners—think early Warner Bros. through contemporary NFB sensibility—with clean, economical character animation and a formal restraint that lets the behavioral comedy breathe without sentimentality.
The genius move is the sound design: every squawk and shuffle becomes percussion, so you're reading the power dynamic entirely through acoustic texture rather than dialogue, which means a micro-budget animated short about a chicken suddenly has the formal sophistication of a much larger film.