On the 8th Day (Au 8ème jour)
2023 · 8m · France
Directed by Agathe Sénéchal, Alicia Massez, Elise Debruyne, Flavie Carin, Théo Duhautois
Genres: animation, documentary, fantasy
Tones: melancholic, mythic
In a vibrant fabric-textured world where animals and landscapes are tethered together by yarn strands connecting to a central energy source, dark tendrils mysteriously invade and spread corruption through those living threads, forcing the animal communities to flee. An environmentalist parable about ecological interdependence — it took seven days to create the world, only one to disrupt its balance.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
3D CGI deliberately designed to look like stop-motion fabric puppets with yarn as both visual connective tissue and ecological-interdependence metaphor — eight minutes of award-winning student work. The form-content rhyme is clean. Yes.
3D CGI deliberately designed to look like hand-crafted fabric stop-motion, with yarn as literal connective tissue and ecological metaphor — that visual-thematic congruence is exactly what student animation should aspire to. Eight minutes; Short of the Week-tier craft.
8:12 award-winning Piktura School student animation — 3D CGI deliberately designed to look like hand-crafted fabric stop-motion with yarn as literal connective tissue. Short of the Week feature, 8K views; the design discipline (CGI pretending to be hand-craft) is the unusual element doing all the conceptual work.
Reviews
While blunt in its themes, the film is not preachy or didactic; it is simply mournful. The combination of sheer world-building scale, the speed and effectiveness of the corrupting action, the dramatic, violin-heavy score...combined to trip up my emotional equilibrium.
For a student film, there's a lot of really creative imagery here and some interesting ideas being explored that deviate from the usual ways that these themes are normally addressed.
Festivals
- Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2024, Best Animated Short (Bruce Corwin Award)
- Bend Film Festival 2024, Best Animated Short
- Palm Springs International ShortFest 2024, Best Student Animation
- Animafest Zagreb 2024, Special Jury Mention
- SXSW 2024
- Drama International Short Film Festival 2024, Drama Green Award