Krach
2006 · 3m · Canada
Directed by Tom Tassel
Genres: animation, dark comedy, satire
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic
Two financiers chase profit by any means and rise quickly up the ladder, only to crash just as fast in a brief animated parable about greed.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A three-minute fable about greed that hits every expected beat—two guys climb, two guys fall, moral delivered. It's competent satire, sure, but it's also the exact story everyone already knows, animated competently but without a single moment that makes you reconsider what satire can do.
Tassel's economy of form here is exemplary: a complete dramatic arc compressed into three minutes of animation that recalls the precision of mid-century parable traditions, with each visual choice earning its place in a lineage stretching from UPA to contemporary political animation.
The decision to compress the rise-and-fall into pure visual momentum—no dialogue, just the audio landscape of trading floors and the sound design of collapse—is what makes this work: it's a film that trusts animation to *move* as metaphor rather than decorate a script.