It's All Related!
2022 · 10m · USA
Directed by Peter Wagner
Genres: animation, comedy, experimental
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, whimsical
Bubbly animated vignettes of overheard nonsense — nachos, bitcoin, psychiatry — assemble into a love story and a breakup story running on the same track. Text-to-speech narration drains the romance of warmth and somehow gives it back colder and funnier.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Synthetic voices doing real emotional damage — Wagner's gimmick is also the point. The kind of short I'd shove at anyone who thinks animation has to mean Pixar.
Robotic TTS voicework against candy-colored animation, narrating love clichés as if read from a receipt — Hertzfeldt's wordiness crossed with OReilly's web-era flatness is a precise formal move.
Robotic TTS voicework against candy-colored animation narrating love cliches as if read from a receipt — that flatness against bubbly visuals is exactly the cold emotional register that David OReilly mode demands.
Reviews
What's your currency? My voice of reason.