Egg
2018 · 12m · France
Directed by Martina Scarpelli
Genres: animation, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
An autobiographical animated documentary in which the filmmaker, in voiceover, recounts her anorexia through an obsessive, geometric-monochrome fantasy about an egg in her kitchen.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's exactly the kind of thing you'd expect—animation + trauma + metaphor—except Scarpelli somehow makes the egg *work*, which is either a miracle or proof that I've been wrong about animated confessionals this whole time, and I'm genuinely unsure which.
A formally sophisticated merger of documentary testimony and symbolic abstraction that positions itself squarely in the essay-film tradition while refusing easy catharsis; the geometric constraint becomes both formal rigor and thematic insistence, a lineage-aware choice that justifies itself through disciplined craft.
The decision to lock the camera into that obsessive, almost architectural animation style while the voice remains raw and intimate creates a friction that makes the whole thing breathe—it's the gap between form and confession that does the real work here.
Reviews
Animation is constructed. It has distance from reality that gives the audience a chance to understand what is happening to the protagonist of the story, mentally... I was able to use space and volume as active elements of narration.