Malaria
2013 · 5m · Brazil
Directed by Edson Oda
Genres: animation, experimental, fantasy
In a saloon at the edge of the old West, a young mercenary named Fabiano is hired for thirty pieces of gold to kill Death himself, who sits across the table from him in human form.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A Western duel with Death itself sounds like every pretentious art student's first screenplay, but Oda doesn't wink at the audience once—he lets the paper move with such patience and gravity that the premise stops being clever and becomes genuinely eerie, which somehow makes it worse.
Oda positions this within a lineage of shadow theater and paper-craft traditions while speaking in pure cinema language—the stop-motion hands become a third character, the table a stage, the gold leaf and ink a formal vocabulary that grounds mythic content in absolute technical discipline.
The disembodied hands manipulating paper aren't a gimmick; they're the entire emotional core—that visible labor, that human tremor in the craft, transforms a 5-minute folktale into something that feels like watching someone's breath catch in real time.
Reviews
Novel ideas in storytelling fall into two categories—form over content or content that happens to have great form.
Festivals
- Seattle International Film Festival 2013, Special Jury Award