Five Cents
2023 · 5m
Directed by Aaron Hughes
Genres: animation, experimental, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
A consumer finds himself in over his head after a string of purchases spirals out of control, drawn by hand on thousands of market data pages from the financial press.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Takes the most boring visual source material possible—financial press data—and transmutes it into absurdist animation that somehow makes you feel the existential dread of late capitalism; it's exactly the kind of subversive premise that makes people say 'wait, they drew WHAT on thousands of pages?' and then can't stop thinking about it.
The formal rigor of using actual market pages as the substrate for hand-drawn animation positions this within a lineage of collage-based experimental work, though the tonal execution—darkly comic rather than purely conceptual—keeps it from reaching the iconic clarity of its predecessors.
The decision to hand-draw the entire consumer narrative directly *onto* the financial data (rather than over it or separate from it) is what makes this work; that single choice collapses the distance between personal debt and systemic abstraction, and suddenly five minutes of animation on paper feels like the only honest way to tell this story.