Los chimplonitos
2016 · 20m · España
Directed by Alberto Pons
Genres: adventure, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: dark, mythic, theatrical
The eternal struggle of good against evil: lights and shadows facing off for the same objective but with different ends. Three continents, a lost city, primordial blood, the great long-lived ones, impossible creatures, gods come from the sky, the necromancer, Chester Copperpot and the Chimplonitos.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 20-minute fever dream that throws together necromancers, sky gods, and a character named Chester Copperpot like some kind of cosmically unhinged mashup — the premise is so aggressively *what the hell* that it loops back around to working, which is exactly the kind of deranged confidence most shorts are too timid to attempt.
Pons constructs a genuinely ambitious mythological architecture across three continents and multiple registers of fantasy, though whether the theatrical maximalism and surreal tonal shifts achieve coherence or collapse under their own weight is the essential formal question the film courts.
The real lift here is likely in how Pons sustains visual or narrative momentum through such expansive, shape-shifting material on a 20-minute runtime—there's a specific choice about pacing or visual language that either makes the chaos cohere or confirm the whole thing's held together by sheer audacity.