Los Huesos (The Bones)
2021 · 21m · Chile
Directed by Cristobal Leon, Joaquin Cocina
Genres: animation, experimental, historical
As Chile drafts a new constitution, the world's first stop-motion animation film is excavated, and a girl performs a ritual exorcism to free Chile from its feudal heritage — weaving national political memory into gothic animated ritual.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Leon and Cocina are building one of the most singular bodies of work in world animation — hand-constructed, politically ferocious, and formally unlike anything else — and The Bones is the tightest proof yet that their technique is inseparable from their argument.
León and Cociña, the Wolf House people, doing fictitious-first-stop-motion-film-as-political-exorcism on Chile's constitutional rewrite. Fourteen minutes. The Wolf House comparison is theirs to claim — this is operating at world-class. The exorcism conceit is, for once, structurally earned.
León and Cociña (The Wolf House) fuse a fictional 1901 stop-motion excavation with a Chilean constitutional exorcism — gothic puppet horror as national political memory. One of the strongest animated objects of the last five years.
Festivals
- Venice Film Festival 2021, Best Short Film