Las héroes
2017 · 3m · Colombia
Directed by Gloria Isabel Gómez, Juan Pablo Castro Velásquez, Silvia Paola Linares Acevedo
Genres: animation, biography, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
Las Héroes is an animated stop-motion short that pays homage to Mexican scientist Susana López, who has fought rotavirus for thirty years through research and vaccines that have helped prevent gastroenteritis in children and babies.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A three-minute stop-motion valentine to a scientist feels like the most obvious, safest swing imaginable—and yet there's something genuinely strange about honoring a virologist through tactile, handmade animation that takes thirty years of lab work and makes it *feel* instead of explain, which most docs wouldn't dare risk.
The film sits comfortably in a lineage of biographical animation—think National Film Board portraiture—and executes that tradition with formal patience: the choice to let stop-motion's inherent slowness mirror the patient, iterative work of vaccine research feels like craft aware of its own métier.
The decision to render scientific labor through the texture and physicality of stop-motion—watching things build frame by frame, the way a vaccine is built cell by cell—is the hinge that makes this work; it's not *about* rotavirus, it's *structured like* the research itself.