La niña que tenía una sola oreja
2009 · 14m · España
Directed by Álvaro León
Genres: animation, experimental, fantasy
Tones: surreal, tender, whimsical
A girl who has only one ear is at the heart of this mixed-media animated short, told with paper puppets, fabrics, lights and shadows.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A one-eared girl could've been cheap symbolism, but León commits to the formal weirdness of mixed-media puppetry—shadows, fabric, paper all talking back to each other—and refuses to make the disability the moral of the story. That's the contrarian move that actually matters.
The craftsmanship sits squarely in a lineage of Central European shadow-play and contemporary art animation; the decision to layer paper puppets with fabric and light sources creates a formally rigorous texture that recalls Švankmajer without pastiche.
The entire film hinges on the choice to use *mixed media*—not just animation, but paper, fabric, and light as equal compositional partners—which transforms what could be a straightforward character study into something tactile and architecturally complex on a student-scale budget.