El perro del collar eléctrico (Dog with Electric Collar)
2008 · 5m · Australia
Directed by Steve Baker
Genres: animation, comedy, dark comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
A dog living in a basement barks incessantly at everything passing the window. His owner decides to put an electric collar on him.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A five-minute animated essay on cruelty disguised as a solution—the collar doesn't silence the dog, it just silences our ability to hear him complain about it. Baker takes the most obvious dark-comedy premise and somehow makes it genuinely unsettling, which is exactly the kind of thing consensus taste would sand down into punchline.
The film operates within a clear lineage of didactic animation and moral fable, though its formal restraint—the confined basement setting, the repetitive barking, the escalating absurdity—recalls the structural precision of mid-century European shorts more than contemporary dark comedy.
The single masterstroke here is the decision to keep the dog's barking consistent and even rhythmic throughout; it transforms what could've been slapstick into something genuinely oppressive, and that sonic refusal to modulate is what separates this from every other 'owner solves problem badly' cartoon.