Hit and Run
2020 · 4m · United Kingdom
Directed by Hannah Brewerton
Genres: animation, comedy, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
Wobbly caricatures of British political figures play out a baseball game of dodged questions, weightless slogans and derailed debate, satirizing the tactics of distraction in politics.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Political satire usually lands with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but Brewerton's wobbly caricatures doing the dodging-and-deflecting dance *are* the point—she's not explaining the absurdity, she's letting it perform itself, which is why it actually stings.
The animation's deliberate crudeness situates itself against a lineage of sharp-lined political cartooning, yet Brewerton resists the polished tradition entirely; the craft here is in knowing exactly when to let formal rigor go slack.
The single choice to make the caricatures physically wobbly—unstable, unsettled—rather than static transforms what could be a tired talking-heads sketch into something kinetic and genuinely disorienting; it costs nothing and changes everything about how the satire lands.
Reviews
Hannah Brewerton's Hit and Run - created as her graduation short from the Royal College of Art - may be specifically focused on the politics of distraction used in the 2019 general election but its showcase of shaky responses and casual dismissal of perpetual failures is perhaps even more resonant in the wake of the UK government's response to the pandemic.