La bella durmiente de la abuelita O’Grimm (Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty)
2008 · 6m · Irlanda
Directed by Nicky Phelan
Genres: animation, dark comedy, fantasy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
Granny O'Grimm, an apparently sweet elderly woman, tells her terrified granddaughter her own version of Sleeping Beauty. As the story progresses, the grandmother becomes increasingly unhinged.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Everyone expects Sleeping Beauty to be saccharine, so watching a grandmother systematically dismantle the fairy tale into something genuinely disturbing—violent, sexual, anarchic—is exactly the kind of premise that makes people uncomfortable in the best way. This is subversion with teeth, and the fact that it's animated makes the darkness somehow sharper.
Phelan's adaptation sits cleverly in the lineage of revisionist fairy tales while maintaining formal control over its tonal shifts; the animation style grounds the increasingly unhinged narrative in a visual consistency that prevents the dark comedy from becoming mere shock value. There's real compositional restraint here—the kind of decision-making that separates a stunt from a considered work.
The entire film hinges on the single choice to let the grandmother's voice performance—increasingly manic, unfiltered, gleefully unhinged—do the heavy lifting while the animation stays deceptively simple and matter-of-fact; it's a masterclass in making limited resources feel explosive through one actor's commitment to the bit.