Locked
1997 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Bhimsain
Genres: animation, drama, experimental
Tones: dark, provocative, surreal
A schoolboy is seized on his way to school and forced to work a dangerous punch press inside a padlock factory with other imprisoned children.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 1997 animated film about child labor in a padlock factory—it's absurdist horror dressed up as a fairy tale, the kind of premise that makes you wince and wonder why no one else is making this. Bhimsain takes a setup that could be didactic agitprop and makes it genuinely unsettling, which is exactly the subversive move most scouts would shy away from.
Bhimsain's *Locked* participates in a long tradition of socially conscious animation (think UPA, think Halas & Batchelor), but its surreal tone and experimental structure push against didacticism rather than lean into it, suggesting a deliberate formal conversation with mid-century political cinema.
The decision to animate mundane factory horror rather than document it gives the piece an eerie abstraction that makes the violence feel more insidious; that single formal choice—surrealism as a tool for depicting exploitation—transforms what could have been a heavy-handed message into something that actually lands in the chest.