"E"
1981 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Bretislav Pojar, Francine Desbiens
Genres: animation, dark comedy, satire
Tones: darkly comic, provocative, surreal
In a paper cut-out fairy tale, a dictator forces his delusions onto his subjects. The dialogue-free animation uses black humour to make its political point explicit.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1981 NFB cutout animation doing political satire without a wink—most scouts would've filed this under 'dated allegory,' but the refusal to cute it up or explain itself is exactly the kind of stubborn formal choice that ages better than yesterday's irony.
Pojar and Desbiens inherit a lineage of puppet-based political critique stretching back to the avant-garde, and this sits perfectly in that tradition: economical, formally rigorous, the black humour earned through compositional restraint rather than spelled out in dialogue.
The paper cutout aesthetic could've been quaint, but the decision to hold on static frames while only the shadows move—creating this uncanny puppet-state effect—is the precise formal gambit that transforms what could've been a pamphlet into something genuinely unsettling on a micro-budget.