Fat Pants
2015 · USA
Directed by Malcolm Rizzuto
Genres: comedy, experimental
A self-described fictional autobiography from animator and filmmaker Malcolm Rizzuto.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A filmmaker weaponizing the autobiography form by admitting it's all made up—that's the kind of genre sabotage that makes consensus critics squirm. Rizzuto's refusal to pick a lane between confession and fiction is exactly the contrarian move that gets dismissed until everyone realizes it was the only honest thing in the room.
The 'fictional autobiography' sits uneasily between personal essay and conceptual art, which is precisely where it loses formal footing; one admires the ambition to trouble autobiography's truth claims, but the film seems more interested in the premise than the craft of executing it.
What works here is Rizzuto's willingness to let animation itself become the unreliable narrator—the stylistic choice to animate a supposedly true story collapses the distance between lived experience and constructed image in a way that feels genuinely earned, not just theoretically clever.