MOTOR GIRL
2025 · 3m
Directed by Val Yu
Genres: animation, drama, sports
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
In the glamorous, male-dominated world of motorsport, racecar driver Mia de Milo stands as the sole female competitor. As cracks begin to form in Mia's confidence and her vehicle falters, her personal insecurities begin to overpower her, and the line between body and machine begins to blur.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Motor Girl does the expected thing—gender-in-motorsport story, body-horror metaphor—and executes it competently, but there's nothing here that genuinely unsettles or rewires how you see the premise; it's well-intentioned rather than dangerous.
The body-machine dissolution recalls a lineage from Tetsuo through contemporary body-horror animation, and Yu's formal restraint—the way the surrealism bleeds in gradually rather than announces itself—suggests real curatorial control over tone and visual language.
The choice to animate Mia's physical disintegration in sync with fractional engine failures rather than showing them as separate crises—that's the decision that makes this work, collapsing internal and mechanical failure into a single, devastating visual grammar.