Love Is Just a Death Away
2020 · 12m · Czech Republic
Directed by Bára Anna Stejskalová
Genres: animation, dark comedy, fantasy
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, tender
A tiny parasite living inside the reanimated corpse of a dead dog on a junkyard goes looking for love and friendship, with doomed courtships of a bird, a rat, and cockroaches.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A parasite inside a reanimated corpse seeking love—this is the kind of premise that makes you lean back and ask *why*, and Stejskalová commits so fully to the absurdity that it somehow becomes genuinely moving. Everyone else would've turned this into a quirky throwaway; she made it sing.
The film's animation ancestry traces clearly to Eastern European puppet traditions and contemporary art cinema's darker registers, and the formal restraint of its junkyard palette—refusing sentimentality at every turn—anchors the surrealism in genuine artistic lineage rather than mere novelty.
The decision to voice the parasite with such vulnerability, almost whispering its courtship attempts while the animation stays deliberately cheap and textured, creates an emotional core that shouldn't work on a 12-minute budget but absolutely does.
Reviews
Romance isn't dead just yet in this dreamy yet brutal stop motion animation by Bára Anna Stejskalová. Despite the decaying world and characters within it, our hero remains optimistic, focusing on the value of kindness and the idea that with an open mind, beauty can be found anywhere.