Dead Horses
2016 · 7m · Spain
Directed by Marc Riba, Anna Solan
Genres: animation, surrealism, war
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
A child fleeing through a war-torn land finds only the corpses of horses, and wonders why they chose to die.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A kid in a war zone asking horses why they chose death instead of running—it's the kind of premise that sounds like grad-school navel-gazing until you realize the film has the spine to actually sit with that absurdity without blinking or explaining it away.
The formal restraint here is exquisite: a 7-minute animated meditation that knows exactly what it owes to the tradition of allegorical war cinema while finding its own language in surrealism and negative space—the kind of considered visual argument that lingers precisely because it refuses easy sentiment.
The decision to animate the horses as almost-painterly forms against a sparse landscape, coupled with that child's voice asking unanswerable questions, transforms what could be heavy-handed into something achingly vulnerable—it's the sound design and compositional stillness doing all the lifting on a minimal budget.
Festivals
- Alcalá de Henares Short Film Festival
- Krakow Film Festival
- Medina Film Festival
- Sant Cugat Fantàstic