Leopoldo el del Bar
2021 · 6m · España
Directed by Diego Porral
Genres: animation, dark comedy, fantasy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, melancholic
Leopoldo, an old man from the centre of Madrid, is left completely alone when the bar he visited daily for the last 12 years — his only human contact in life — shuts down. The loneliness he has been avoiding rushes back, in the form of Mauricio, a giant pigeon with verbal diarrhoea who will try to talk Leopoldo into accepting his fate.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A sentient pigeon therapist materializing to process a man's existential dread through absurdist banter—this is the kind of "wait, WHAT?" premise that makes absolute sense once you're inside it, and most scouts would've binned it at logline alone, which is precisely why it works.
Porral locates the film in a lineage of European absurdist animation—there's Švankmajer's deadpan surrealism and Jeunet's melancholic whimsy here—and the restraint in the visual language (the bar, the pigeon, the void) demonstrates real formal discipline in resisting sentimentality.
The decision to make Mauricio's verbal torrents the *form* of the film rather than its joke—using sound design and pacing to let the pigeon's compulsive speech become the shape of Leopoldo's inner architecture—is the single craft choice that elevates this from neat concept to genuinely haunting.