Keep Frozen!
2023 · 8m · France
Directed by Jeanne Tiessé
Genres: animation, dark comedy, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
At 8 a.m. in the Troubadour-sur-Yvette mall, employees finish preparing the store for opening — just as a man steps into the main aisle and silently removes all his clothes.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A man strips naked in a mall at opening time and *nobody reacts*—the absurdist escalation of everyday compliance is exactly the kind of premise that makes other scouts squirm, which means Tiessé nailed it. Satire that doesn't announce itself is the rarest thing; this one just lets the mall keep humming.
Tiessé's restraint in the mise-en-scène—the mundane geometry of the mall, the formal distance of the animation—creates a deadpan scaffold that the satire depends on; it's sitcom-familiar surfaces deployed with real compositional discipline.
The decision to animate rather than shoot live is what makes this work: the slight remove lets the grotesque vulnerability of the act sit without flinching, and the employees' non-reaction becomes uncanny instead of just uncomfortable.