My Favourite Hill!
2020 · 4m · United Kingdom
Directed by Christopher Childs
Genres: animation, experimental, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, surreal, whimsical
A group of paper-cut-out factory workers become obsessed with a hill, letting loose on the marshy earth and succumbing to their strange desires while the hill watches them like a deranged poet.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Paper cutouts and marshy earth—a factory of cardboard bodies melting into landscape worship like some deranged folk ritual. This is exactly the kind of premise that makes conventional programmers squirm, and it's *perfect*.
Childs situates this within a lineage of stop-motion surrealism (Quay, PES) but the execution feels oddly thin—formally inventive in its paper aesthetic, yet lacking the compositional rigor that would elevate the whimsy into something architecturally sound.
The choice to animate the workers as flat cutouts against dimensional terrain creates this uncanny depth-play that forces you to hold two registers of reality at once; it's a single formal decision that makes the whole strange world *read*.