Hollow Land
2013 · 13m · Canada
Directed by Michelle Kranot, Uri Kranot
Genres: animation, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
Newly arrived couple Solomon and Berta, carrying their treasured bathtub, search for a lasting home in a promised land that slowly disappoints.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to read this as a parable about displacement and the failed dream, which sure, fine—but what actually gets under my skin is how the bathtub becomes this absurd anchor to nowhere, this object that refuses to mean anything grand. It's too weird to be safe, but too formally patient to be genuinely reckless.
The Kranots' hand-drawn sensibility sits squarely in an animated allegory tradition—Kris and the Lambs, early Svankmajer—yet the bathtub motif and the couple's pilgrimage structure it as something closer to a visual parable, executed with the kind of compositional discipline that rewards repeat viewings and argument.
What elevates this beyond competent symbolism is the sound design choice: the persistent, almost comedic *clang* of that bathtub against landscape, a repeated sonic refusal that undercuts every moment of mythic yearning and somehow makes the melancholy hit harder.