Bad Seeds
2020 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Claude Cloutier
Genres: animation, experimental, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, dark, surreal
In a strange world of shape-shifting carnivorous plants, growth becomes rivalry and evolution a duel echoing westerns, the Cold War, and board games.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A film that starts as nature doc and pivots into Cold War allegory via carnivorous plants—Cloutier's refusing every easy lane, and the fact that it *works* as both grotesque comedy and genuine dread is exactly the kind of subversive move that makes consensus scouts uncomfortable. This is what happens when you stop asking 'what's the story?' and start asking 'what if the metaphor ate the plot?'
Cloutier positions this squarely in a lineage of didactic animation and absurdist fable—Švankmajer's influence is clear—but the formal control here, the way each morphing plant gesture echoes both Darwinian anxiety and geopolitical tension, demonstrates a curator's hand aware of what surrealism can carry when it's disciplined rather than merely ornamental.
The decision to anchor all that conceptual chaos in the *sound* of competing growth—that wet, organic tearing—is what keeps this from floating into pure abstraction; it's the one tactile choice that makes the shape-shifting feel visceral and earned rather than decorative, and it's the kind of small, ruthless sound design choice that turns six minutes into a complete film.