Madame Tutli-Putli
2007 · 17m · Canada
Directed by Chris Lavis, Maciek Szczerbowski
Genres: animation, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Travelling alone on a night train with her possessions, Madame Tutli-Putli encounters kind and threatening strangers between real and imagined worlds.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A surreal train compartment opera that could've been pretentious garbage, but instead it's genuinely unsettling—Lavis and Szczerbowski refuse to let you settle into any genre anchor, which is exactly why it works.
The stop-motion craftsmanship here sits in conversation with a lineage of psychologically unstable animation (think Švankmajer), but the formal decision to blur waking and nightmare states through purely visual means—no exposition, no anchoring—is what makes this essential cinema.
The sound design choice—how the train's rhythm either comforts or threatens depending on what we're witnessing—is the hinge the entire film swings on; everything else follows from that one decision to let ambient noise carry the emotional weight.