Balablok
1972 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Bretislav Pojar
Genres: animation, satire, war
Tones: absurdist, dark, surreal
Contented cubes declare war after one meets a ball, fighting until all share a new shape, then a triangle appears and the cycle threatens to begin again.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 1972 Czech animator makes a seven-minute film about geometric shapes going to war, and somehow it's a perfect political allegory that doesn't need a single word of dialogue—just pure, unapologetic formal violence. Most scouts would file this under 'experimental oddity'; I file it under 'why aren't we funding ten more like this.'
Pojar's Balablok sits confidently in a lineage of modernist animation that treats abstraction as moral argument, recalling the constructivist avant-garde while maintaining its own restrained, almost Brechtian distance from sentiment. The cycle's return—that final threat of renewal—suggests a formal rigor about repetition and inevitability that rewards close looking.
The whole film turns on a single choice: letting the shapes move with weight and consequence rather than as cartoon abstractions, so when cubes transform into spheres it reads not as cute metamorphosis but as genuine existential capitulation. That tonal decision—treating geometric transformation as loss—is what makes the satire sting.