Mauvaises Herbes (Bad Seeds)
2021 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Claude Cloutier
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
Two carnivorous plants wage an escalating duel for food and dominance through surreal metamorphoses — a hand-drawn fable about greed and competition.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Carnivorous plants in an evolutionary arms race, Claude Cloutier hand-drawn — that's NFB pedigree mating with Tex Avery, and I will absolutely watch six minutes of that. No dialogue is a feature.
Cloutier's hand-drawn evolutionary arms race citing Western, Cold War, and board games is precisely the formal density I want from NFB-tradition animation, and the absence of dialogue places it in the Frédéric Back lineage. Six minutes well-spent.
6-minute hand-drawn evolutionary arms-race with no dialogue, from Claude Cloutier (Sleeping Betty director) — when a master 2D animator commits to wordless metamorphosis, every transformation has to do narrative work. The Western/Cold War allusions suggest dense visual citation.
Festivals
- Annecy 2021
- 94th Academy Awards 2022, Shortlisted