Kill Your Darlings
2023 · 6m · Switzerland
Directed by Thirza Ingold
Genres: animation, comedy, drama
Tones: dark, darkly comic, whimsical
Farmer Olga adores her pet pigs but also loves pork. When she butchers two of her three pigs, they find themselves on a cloud where they can influence the weather and events on the farm — starting a darkly comic cycle of consequence and destruction.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Stop-motion pigs become weather-influencing afterlife specters intercut with real mortadella close-ups — six minutes of polymer-clay creep and it sounds great. Visceral juxtaposition is the right move.
Ingold juxtaposes handcrafted polymer-clay puppets with close-ups of real mortadella, a tactile-as-thesis gesture in the Niki Lindroth von Bahr lineage where the materials carry the moral weight. A small, sharp object.
5:49 of handcrafted stop-motion (polymer clay, foam latex, needle felt) jarringly intercut with close-ups of real mortadella — that material juxtaposition is exactly the kind of gross-out craft choice that turns a fable into something unsettling. 44.2K views and 187 likes for under six minutes is a strong ratio.
Reviews
Charming yet faintly unsettling stop-motion short that has the potential to spark reflection about personal choices — a fable about the price of greed and short-sighted thinking.
Ingold's bold inclusion of real meat within the visuals creates a jarring moment where one of the adorable piggies is abruptly replaced by a full-screen image of mortadella, heightening the psychological complexity.
Festivals
- Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival 2023
- Solothurn Film Days 2024
- Festival Premiers Plans d'Angers 2024
- Berlin International Short Film Festival 2024
- Leuven International Short Film Festival 2024
- Fantoche International Animation Film Festival 2023
- Encounters Film Festival 2024
- Go Short International Short Film Festival 2024