Onions and Garlic
1978 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Eva Szasz
Genres: animation, comedy, fantasy
A Hebrew folk tale follows a man bringing onions to a distant kingdom and a scoundrel scheming to profit from it.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A Hebrew folk tale about onions and scheming—sounds like someone's grandmother's bedtime story, and that's exactly why it shouldn't work. Except Szasz makes the mundane absurd enough that you're genuinely unsure if you're watching folk wisdom or a con artist's fever dream, which is the only reason it's interesting at all.
Szasz situates this 1978 animation squarely in the tradition of didactic folk fabulism, where moral instruction and visual wit aren't opposed but intertwined; the formal restraint of the animation and the economy of the narrative form a considered whole that recalls the best lineage of European short animation working in parable.
The entire film turns on the decision to treat the onion itself as a character—not as metaphor, but as the actual object of desire and suspicion—which transforms what could be a straightforward morality tale into something genuinely peculiar and memorable on a shoestring budget.