Here's the Plan
2017 · 18m · Chile
Directed by Fernanda Frick
Genres: animation, drama, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A married cat-dog couple of cupcake bakers dream of opening their own bakery, but when their oven breaks they drift apart from their dream — and from themselves.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A talking animal couple having a mid-life crisis over a broken oven sounds like treacly Pixar setup, but Frick uses the mundane domestic failure as a genuine rupture—it's a subversive read on the American Dream, and it actually commits to the sadness instead of sweetening it.
The film understands the grammar of contemporary animation's emotional register while maintaining a formal distance; the melancholy accumulates through restraint and negative space, positioning itself in a lineage of character-driven animation that privileges interior loss over narrative spectacle.
What elevates this is the decision to let the oven—a single broken object—become the emotional fulcrum of the entire relationship; the specificity of that choice, and how the animation isolates moments of quiet disconnection between two characters who still love each other, is what makes the small scope feel essential rather than slight.