Centopeia
2016 · 7m · France
Directed by Clement Rouil, Leonie Després, Bertrand Piot, Yoann Drulhe, Alexis Caillet, Jerôme Regef
Genres: animation, drama, satire
Tones: absurdist, dark, theatrical
In a dictatorship, a famous singer unwillingly becomes the icon of the revolution and is tossed from one faction to the other, from the revolutionists into the hands of the dictator.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Six directors steering one singer through the machinery of power—it's a concept that should collapse into noise, but instead it becomes a funhouse mirror of consensus politics that actually works. The absurdist theology here (revolutionary icon → dictator's puppet → revolutionary again) is too clever for its own good, which means it's exactly clever enough.
Centopeia arrives as a formal argument about the author function in animation: six directors pooling technique to explore how a body (the singer) gets conscripted by competing narratives, each faction animating her differently. The theatrical staging and tonal control across this collaboration reads as genuine engagement with political allegory's visual grammar.
What locks this is the decision to keep the singer's face relatively neutral while the world whips around her—every cut, every faction's aesthetic shift happens *around* her, not to her, and that stillness becomes the film's moral core in seven minutes.