New Year
2019 · 9m
Directed by Diana Gradinaru, Rory Waudby-Tolley
Genres: animation, dark comedy, sci-fi
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, whimsical
A boy in 1999 obsessed with the Y2K bug and a girl in a drowned future learning to be a priest in the religion built from the artefacts he left behind.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A boy afraid of digital apocalypse becomes the accidental god of a drowned world—it's the kind of premise that sounds ridiculous until you realize it's actually *about* how we mythologize our own obsolescence. Animation + sci-fi + religion built from Y2K detritus is the exact kind of "wait, WHAT?" bender that makes everyone else nervous and makes me sit up.
The formal architecture here is exquisite: two timelines separated by catastrophe, yet bound by the material culture of one era becoming the sacred objects of another. Gradinaru and Waudby-Tolley demonstrate real control over how animation can telescope between scales of meaning—intimate character and vast temporal irony held in the same frame.
The decision to animate the boy's mundane 1999 bedroom and the drowned future temple in the same visual register—neither mocking the past nor over-rendering the fantasy—is what makes the premise land instead of collapse into whimsy. That tonal consistency across such disparate worlds takes discipline.
Reviews
A wonderfully creative short written and directed by Diana Gradinaru and Rory Waudby-Tolley. Ravaged by millennia of climate breakdown, Britain is underwater. But Simon's ramblings and football stickers inspire a faith where the heat of the earth is respected and 90s Man United midfielder Nicky Butt is worshiped as a God.