Nod. Wink. Horse.
2020 · 5m · United Kingdom
Directed by Ollie Magee
Genres: animation, experimental
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, provocative
An RCA animation about a kitchen porter, a hungry dog and a belligerent drunk — almost entirely obscured behind a horse.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A five-minute RCA student film that commits so fully to the bit—a horse obscuring literally everything—that it becomes genuinely subversive; most directors would panic and reframe, but Magee leans into the obstruction like it's the whole point, and somehow the absurdity lands.
The formal rigor here is in what's *withheld* rather than shown, a constraint that echoes structuralist animation traditions while the tonal tightrope between absurdist humor and something almost elegiac suggests a young filmmaker already thinking about syntax and restraint.
The decision to make the horse the compositional anchor rather than a gag—keeping it static while chaos presumably unfolds behind it—is the kind of economical formal choice that transforms a premise into something that feels authored and considered rather than just cute.
Reviews
A 5-minute animation that asks its audience to reexamine its preconceptions of narrative, forget the classic headscratcher 'if a trees fall in wood...' and ask yourself this: If a story is obscured by a horse, is it still a story? It's absurd and a little anarchic but in the end, it's the only film that it could have been.