Generador adolescente
1998 · 11m · España
Directed by Pedro Temboury
Genres: comedy, coming-of-age, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, humorous, whimsical
A teenager creates a machine that turns boring adults into wild youngsters and decides to use it on his school's teachers, changing the school year forever.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A premise this audacious—teenager weaponizes a de-aging machine against institutional authority—should collapse under its own absurdism, but Temboury commits to the bit with anarchic glee, turning a high-concept gag into actual subversion dressed as a punchline.
While the film's whimsy sits outside the canonical lineages of sci-fi comedy, there's a disciplined formal restraint here—the machine logic functions almost like a Méliès trick updated for a late-90s sensibility, with the editing maintaining crisp separation between the banal before-state and the chaos after.
The entire film pivots on a single decision: treating the de-aging effect not as spectacle but as consequence—the real comedy emerges from how the adults *move and behave* differently, which sells the transformation on a shoestring in a way that feels earned rather than effects-dependent.