Carrotica
2024 · 13m
Directed by Daniel Sterlin-Altman
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, LGBTQ+
Tones: darkly comic, melancholic, surreal
A teenage boy writing explicit gay erotica and his mother falling for a femme fatale carrot drift through loneliness, desire, and growing pains in hand-crafted stop motion.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A teenage boy's gay erotica writing paired with his mother's affair with a literal carrot should be absurd enough to fail spectacularly, but Sterlin-Altman commits so completely to the surreal loneliness that it somehow becomes genuinely moving—the kind of premise that makes other programmers squirm while Felix nods knowingly.
The stop-motion craft here is meticulous and intentional, situating itself in a lineage of darkly poetic animation that treats the absurd with formal restraint; each frame's deliberation serves the film's meditation on desire and isolation rather than winking at its own strangeness.
The decision to make the mother's love interest an actual carrot—not metaphorical, just a femme fatale root vegetable—is the fulcrum that transforms what could be maudlin coming-of-age into something brittle and true, and you can feel that single conceptual choice ripple through every frame of animation.
Festivals
- Annecy International Animation Film Festival 2024, Cristal for Best Graduation Short