Bartleby
2017 · 11m · United States
Directed by Laura Naylor, Kristen Kee
Genres: animation, dark comedy, satire
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
A stop-motion, nearly wordless retelling of Melville's 'Bartleby, the Scrivener,' set in a modern Wall Street office where dialogue spills from mouths as floating letters.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Stop-motion Melville adaptation sounds like the kind of precious lit-crit exercise everyone nods at, but Naylor and Kee actually pull off something weirder—turning abstract dread into floating typography and refusing easy sentiment about burnout. It's smarter than it has any right to be.
A formally rigorous reimagining that dialogues with both Melville's source text and the visual language of experimental animation; the choice to externalize dialogue as floating letters is a deliberate formal gesture that rewrites how we read character interiority in adaptation.
The floating-letter conceit could be gimmicky, but it's the restraint in the animation itself—sparse, almost austere stop-motion paired with that single formal rule—that makes the absurdity land; it's a $0 budget idea executed with enough conviction that it becomes the whole film.
Reviews
It's hard to believe that in all the years of covering short films that I had yet to write about one based on a classic short story. Herman Melville's 'Bartleby' (first published in 1853) has been adapted into two features, but the story works perfectly well as a 10-minute, wordless, animated short.
Festivals
- Aspen Shortsfest 2017, Official Selection (US Premiere)