Avoidance
2014 · 5m · Israel
Directed by Erica Rotberg
Genres: animation, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, provocative
A dialogue-free animated short that strings together vignettes of people emotionally detaching from reality, escaping into the comfortable, flat, fake alternate worlds offered by screens, devices, and self-made fantasies. Made as a final design project at the Holon Institute of Technology (HIT).
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Rotberg's doing the obvious thing here—flat animation about flat screens, critique baked into the form—and yet somehow it still lands because the *execution* is so committed to the bit that you can't look away; the irony becomes genuine melancholy.
A formally self-aware piece that understands its lineage in both animation and media critique, where the deliberate flatness functions as both medium and message—though one wonders if the visual metaphor doesn't slightly overexplain what the vignettes already articulate.
The genius move is that Rotberg strips away dialogue entirely and lets the *rhythm* of cutting between screens and faces do all the emotional work—it's a constraint that becomes the whole film, and that discipline is what separates this from a dozen other scrolling-through-life shorts.
Reviews
a melancholic animated short by Holon Institute of Technology design student Erica Rotberg that explores how computers, televisions, smartphones, and video games detach people from the real world and each other.