Bottom Feeders
2015 · 3m · UK
Directed by Matt Reynolds
Genres: animation, dark comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
An animated short following two fictional deep-sea species as they attempt to navigate a bleak, predatory natural world — a parody of nature documentary conventions and the violence lurking beneath their benign surface.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Reynolds understands that formal parody only works when it's technically precise — the animation quality is high enough that the dark joke lands clean. Best International at Animatricks is deserved; this is a tightly engineered piece of craft.
Nature-documentary parody. The premise lives or dies on the narration, and SXSW liked it. Probably funny. Probably also one of forty similar shorts that year.
Matt Reynolds weaponizes the gentle register of nature-doc narration against itself — bleakness funneled through the calm-voice convention, and the calmer it gets the funnier the cruelty. SXSW knew what they had.
Festivals
- SXSW 2015
- Animatricks Festival 2015, Best International Animation