Cot Cot
2007 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Pierre Sylvestre
Genres: animation, comedy, western
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, whimsical
A solitary cowboy on a vast prairie loses patience with clucking chickens and a deceptively clever cow in a parody of the western.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A cowboy western where the real antagonists are poultry and bovine scheming—it's the kind of genre deconstruction that sounds stupid until you watch a frustrated gunslinger get genuinely outmaneuvered by a cow, at which point it becomes genuinely subversive.
Sylvestre's economy of line and timing recall classic animation's formal discipline, but the film's real lineage is the absurdist subversion of genre tropes that runs through postmodern short work—a precisely executed parody that knows exactly what it's dismantling.
The film hinges on a single formal choice: treating the livestock with the same compositional weight and intelligence as the human protagonist, which flips the entire power dynamic and makes the humor land with unexpected sharpness on a modest budget.