Monkey Movie
2024 · 6m · Denmark
Directed by Svanna Christiansen
Genres: drama, fantasy, satire
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, dark
In a jungle canopy where monkeys higher in the hierarchy take most of the sunlight, a fallen dead monkey disrupts the darkness. Vervet, armed with a small glass, plays with a new ray of light — but those above block it, and while others scatter, Vervet keeps fighting for a spot in the sun.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 6-minute fable that inverts the usual underdog narrative—Vervet's refusal to scatter isn't heroic defiance, it's almost pathological, and Christiansen leans into that discomfort rather than rewarding it. The absurdist machinery of a monkey society stratified by sunlight access is exactly the kind of "wait, WHAT?" premise that makes other scouts nervous and me certain.
Christiansen's film sits comfortably in a lineage of anthropomorphic satire stretching back through fable and contemporary animation, with a compositional restraint—that glass catching light as both McGuffin and symbol—that recalls the formal economy of shorts like those in the Pixar stable but darker, more skeptical.
The decision to make the protagonist's persistence pathetic rather than triumphant—to let Vervet stay fixated on that one ray while narrative logic keeps it from ever arriving—is the hinge the whole film turns on, and it's a choice that costs nothing to make but everything in emotional weight.