Barbeque
2017 · 6m · United Kingdom
Directed by Jenny Jokela
Genres: animation, experimental, horror
Tones: dark, provocative, surreal
A hand-painted animated journey through a nightmarish, ever-shifting world where women peel off their own skin, travelling a circular path through images of disfigurement and mutation as a visceral meditation on shame, disembodiment, and the emotional aftermath of sexual harassment and assault.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Jokela does what animation is supposed to do but almost never does—she weaponizes the medium's peculiar intimacy to make bodily horror feel *personal* rather than just grotesque, turning skin-peeling into a syntax for trauma that live-action could never stomach. This is the kind of film that makes you understand why people are scared of animation.
The hand-painted technique situates itself deliberately within a lineage of embodied abstraction—Švankmajer, perhaps, or the feminist body-horror tradition of experimental animation—but Jokela's formal restraint (the circular path, the repetition, the refusal of narrative resolution) elevates it beyond provocation into something genuinely rigorous.
The choice to animate in hand-painted frames rather than digitize or stylize creates a kind of exhausted, intimate texture that makes each mutation feel *drawn* by hand—like the film itself is doing the labor of transformation—which is the entire conceptual argument about embodiment working at the surface level of production.
Reviews
It's a film that contains the tone and tension of a Horror, but the form and approach of an experimental animation. On the one hand, Jokela's film is an unnerving, anxiety-inducing watch, yet its rich visual approach means it's a short you can't help but admire on a technical level.