Monsieur Pug
2014 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Janet Perlman
Genres: animation, dark comedy, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
Monsieur Pug, a dog with bad cholesterol who loves pie and origami, is convinced a vast conspiracy targets him and pretends to be a pet to hide, in a fable about smartphone-era madness.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A paranoid pug doing origami while convinced the world is gaslighting him—this is exactly the kind of premise that makes people uncomfortable because it's *actually* funny about surveillance anxiety and self-delusion, not just cute animal window dressing. Nobody else would've greenlit this, which is precisely why it works.
Perlman's animation sits comfortably in the NFB's lineage of darkly intelligent fable-making, where the formal control of the medium becomes inseparable from the satire; the cholesterol subplot and origami detail are the kinds of specifics that reveal a filmmaker thinking rigorously about metaphor.
The decision to play the conspiracy completely straight—treating a dog's paranoid logic with the same seriousness as his pie addiction—is what transforms a high-concept joke into something that actually lands; it's a single tonal commitment that makes everything else breathe.