Catch It
2015 · 5m · Francia
Directed by Jordan Soler, Julien Robyn, Marion Demaret, Nadège Forner, Paul Bar, Pierre-Baptiste Marty
Genres: animation, comedy, family
A group of meerkats guard their beloved only fruit near their burrow, but a vulture intends to disturb their tranquillity, sparking a chase across the savanna.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Six directors collaborating on a premise that sounds like a Pixar rejected pitch—meerkats vs. vulture, fruit at stake—and somehow they resist the expected beats entirely; the real subversion is that it *works* without irony, which is almost offensive to my taste.
A cleanly constructed chase comedy with the formal discipline of classic theatrical animation; the ensemble directorial approach suggests a studied attention to timing and staging that recalls the golden age of short-form comedy craft.
The ensemble direction of six filmmakers on a five-minute runtime could've been chaos, but the decision to build the entire piece around rhythm—the escalating percussion of the chase, the meerkats' synchronized movement—suggests a rare consensus on what the film *is*, not just what it shows.