Carrousel
2020 · 10m · Belgium
Directed by Jasmine Elsen
Genres: animation, dark comedy, fantasy
Tones: darkly comic, melancholic, surreal
In a park microcosm where Roos lives with her snails, the arrival of two newcomers who fall in love turns her defensive and aggressive, in a stop-motion fable about dehumanization.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Stop-motion fable about snails and dehumanization sounds like earnest indie whimsy until it doesn't—Elsen commits to the aggression and makes the premise genuinely unsettling, which is exactly the kind of tonal rug-pull that separates the interesting from the try-hard.
Elsen's command of the stop-motion language—the deliberate pacing, the texture of small bodies in contested space—places Carrousel in conversation with Quay and Švankmajer, though the moral allegory feels somewhat untethered from its formal precision.
The genius move is treating the snails as Roos's actual peers rather than pets or metaphors; that single directorial choice reframes the entire emotional architecture and makes the jealousy and violence feel earned rather than imposed on the premise.