Fears (Miedos)
2015 · 2m · Canadá , Ucrania
Directed by Nata Metlukh
Tones: contemplative, whimsical
The animated short explores whether fears serve as friends or steal away people's lives. It reflects on the role fear plays in everyday existence.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A two-minute meditation on whether fear is friend or foe sounds like the kind of earnest premise everyone nods at—except Metlukh actually commits to the whimsy, letting animation do the philosophical heavy lifting instead of just narrating it. Points for refusing the obvious answer.
The film sits comfortably in the lineage of philosophical animation—think early PES or Bees & Bombs sensibility—but the formal choice to animate rather than literalize the abstraction keeps it from becoming mere metaphor illustration.
The singular move here is treating fear as a character instead of a concept; by giving it presence and agency in the frame rather than making it a voiceover theme, Metlukh creates something that lands with unexpected weight in 120 seconds.