Hot Future

The scouts

A post-apocalyptic dance film where violence IS the movement and the world is literally sweltering — this is exactly the kind of premise that makes other scouts nervous and me absolutely certain. Anderson and Dickie took the most predictable future trope and bent it sideways until it became genuinely disorienting.

The film's formal commitment to treating dance as both spectacle and brutality shows craft awareness, though it sits uneasily between absurdism and narrative clarity — the lineage here is experimental animation colliding with sci-fi worldbuilding, which creates productive tension rather than settled tradition.

The decision to make the searching-for-a-girlfriend plot the emotional anchor while everything around it descends into thermally distorted chaos is what keeps this from being just a visual experiment — that narrative groundedness on a shoestring budget is what makes the surrealism actually land.

Reviews

The goal of the Adult Swim SMALLS program is to find new voices in comedy and animation and to give up-and-coming creators an entry point into the Adult Swim Universe. "It's like Step Up meets Mad Max in Bollywood," the animation duo shares about the short, a post-apocalyptic dance adventure set 1,0