Ecosistema
2003 · 11m · España
Directed by Tinieblas González
Genres: animation, dark comedy, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, dark, surreal
A fly, a spider, a rabbit and a girl form a peculiar urban ecosystem governed by the same law as any natural one: the strong devour the weak.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 2003 animated short that treats predation and hierarchy as a *joke* — stacking a fly, spider, rabbit, and girl into an absurdist food chain and letting the dark comedy rot from there. Most scouts would call this 'quirky fable,' but González is doing something weirder: making the cruelty of natural law feel like the only honest premise in urban life.
González situates herself in a lineage of surrealist animation that questions anthropomorphism — the formal rigor is in the economy of the design and the deliberate flatness that keeps us from sentimentalizing any creature's position in the chain. The editing discipline here serves the film's central thesis: no mercy, no exceptions.
The decision to animate the girl into the ecosystem *as a peer* rather than keeper or observer is what makes this work — one small directorial choice that reframes the whole moral axis and suggests González understood something about scale and power that most animators sidestep entirely.