BIG GAME
2013 · 6m · South Africa
Directed by Sarah Scrimgeour, Aarin Lehmkuhl, Romy Latter, Miro Kolenic, Jarrod Hasenjager, Matthew Furnell
Genres: animation, dark comedy, fantasy
Tones: darkly comic, tender, whimsical
Bobo, a lonely monster, is set to spend yet another birthday alone, until a cunning hunter throws him a killer surprise party.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Six directors on a 6-minute monster birthday party sounds like consensus-building nightmare fuel, but somehow this collective actually *subverts* the lonely-creature-finds-belonging trope by leaning into the hunter's predatory calculus—the surprise party becomes genuinely unsettling in ways a single auteur might've softened.
The formal architecture here is elegant: a simple emotional premise executed through collaborative animation with visible restraint, each director's hand integrated into a cohesive tonal register that recalls stop-motion traditions while refusing sentimentality.
The genius move is the sound design—the way the party sounds *wrong*, slightly off-kilter and menacing even as the visuals suggest celebration—that single sonic choice is what makes you realize the hunter's gift might be something else entirely, and it's doing all the heavy lifting on a shoestring.