Charlie's Buck Teeth
2016 · 7m · France
Directed by Esther Lalanne, Yao Xing, Valentin Sabin, Camille Verninas, Chao-Hao Yang
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, fantasy
A bullied boy with buck teeth loses his scarf and is pushed into a magical journey of self-esteem.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A five-person collective making a whimsical bullying-to-self-esteem arc feels like it should be saccharine wallpaper, but I'd need to see if they actually subvert the magical-journey formula or just execute it competently—the premise alone doesn't promise anything worth fighting for.
The collaborative directorial approach suggests a thoughtful negotiation of voice across multiple sensibilities, which in animation can either fracture the work or deepen it; the formal question here is whether five artists in sync produce something architecturally more interesting than one vision alone.
Five directors on a 7-minute short is either chaos or precision—and the fact that this came together suggests someone made a crucial structural or editorial choice that glued disparate sensibilities into one object; I want to know what that decision was.