Lullaby for Lina
2024 · 2m
Directed by Izzy Obey
Genres: animation, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: dark, melancholic, surreal
A little bunny gets trapped in her own dream -- to leave, she must relive her nightmares.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A bunny trapped in recursive nightmares sounds like the kind of fractured logic that could've been annoying in less assured hands, but Obey refuses to let it become whimsy — the surrealism stays genuinely unsettling, which is the opposite move from what you'd expect.
The film sits cleanly in a lineage of dark animation that traces back through Central European fabulism and contemporary art-house animation, with deliberate compositional choices that signal restraint and control over 2 minutes.
The decision to keep Lina silent — letting the dream logic breathe without exposition or internal monologue — forces every visual transition and sound design choice to carry narrative weight that would normally split across dialogue, and that economy is what makes a 2-minute nightmare actually stick.