Everybody Goes to the Hospital
2022 · 9m · USA
Directed by Tiffany Kimmel
Genres: animation, drama, horror
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic, surreal
Based on a true story, this stop-motion animated short follows 4-year-old 'Little Mata' — director Tiffany Kimmel's mother — whose 1963 hospitalization for appendicitis spirals into a nightmarish ordeal across 7 chapters as her symptoms are dismissed and her appendix bursts, told as an 'unprocessed traumatic fairytale' seen entirely through a child's terrified eyes.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Stop-motion medical horror told as a 7-chapter storybook of the director's mom's 1963 burst appendix, from a 4-year-old's POV. That specificity is the entire reason it works.
Kimmel structures her mother's 1963 medical trauma as a seven-chapter fairytale in handcrafted stop-motion — the doll-like puppetry weaponized for genuine terror. The intergenerational testimony is the formal substrate.
Stop-motion structured as a 7-chapter storybook fairytale rendering real family trauma from a 4-year-old's POV — produced remotely across quarantine bubbles in East LA, which is its own production miracle. Doll-photorealistic puppetry as medical horror is the right form choice.
Reviews
Told through the eyes of a child, Everybody Goes to the Hospital is shockingly heavy, beautifully poetic, and fantastically haunting.
A haunting stop-motion animated incision into childhood trauma, interpreted with a poet's eye.
Festivals
- Fantasia Film Festival 2022
- Brooklyn Horror Film Festival 2022, Special Jury Award; Best Cinematography
- Fantastic Fest 2022
- Boston Underground Film Festival 2022, Best Animated Short
- Overlook Film Festival 2022
- Alameda International Film Festival 2022, Best Animated Short; Phil Tippett Animation Award
- Jim Thorpe Indie Film Festival 2023, Best Animation