IHR (THEM)
2021 · 6m
Directed by Amélie Cochet, Louis Möhrle
Genres: animation, dark comedy, satire
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
Residents of an apartment building carelessly toss trash into a shared courtyard, and a small pile of garbage becomes something else entirely — a fable about passing blame onto others.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A trash pile achieves sentience through collective negligence—it's a fable that inverts every earnest environmental parable by making the garbage itself the victim and witness, which is exactly the kind of subversive inversion that makes people uncomfortable in the best way.
The film demonstrates precise control over its satirical apparatus, with each discarded object a carefully placed formal element in a composition that echoes both Kka's absurdism and a longer tradition of anthropomorphic social critique, executed with the restraint of animators who know their lineage.
The decision to give the trash pile a vague, almost-sentient presence through sound design and subtle animation—never quite confirming whether it's alive or we're projecting—is the crack through which the whole film's meaning pours out, and it's done on what feels like a shoestring.
Reviews
Really clever storytelling and a deceptively simple style; great work all around.