Desolado
2014 · 7m · España
Directed by Víctor Nores
Genres: animation, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, whimsical
What would happen if the sun did not exist — or at least if the clouds could hide it? Tito imagines a world where sunflowers do not need to look at the sky, where the moon works overtime to get a smile out of him… and why?
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A sunflower that refuses to heliotrope, a moon pulling double shifts for a kid's attention—Nores inverts the whole emotional grammar of hope and natural law, which should be insufferable but somehow lands as genuinely strange and earned.
The film's restraint in animation, its deliberate flatness and muted palette, positions it thoughtfully within a lineage of philosophical animation that traces back through Eastern European fable traditions; the formal choice to let silence do the melancholic work is what separates this from mere whimsy.
That decision to strip the sunflower of its defining trait—to remove the *reason* it exists—and then rebuild emotional stakes around a child seeking comfort from a moon instead: that one constraint restructures everything, and you feel it in every frame.