Purple Hat
1974 · 1m · Canada
Directed by Lynn Smith
Genres: animation, comedy, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, whimsical
A young smoker invents elaborate chance-based rituals to decide whether to quit, turning each excuse into a test left to fate.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A one-minute animation that weaponizes absurdist logic against the most boring human impulse—self-improvement through willpower—by letting chance decide everything; it's the kind of subversive little grenade that makes you laugh at your own broken reasoning and everyone else's.
Lynn Smith's economical animation sits comfortably within the lineage of NFB experimental comedy, where formal constraint (one minute, animation, a single gimmick) becomes the crucible for genuine formal invention and thematic resonance.
The decision to make the rituals themselves the entire story—not the smoking, not the quitting, but the elaborate performative logic of deferring to fate—is the one choice that transforms a simple premise into something that feels genuinely strange and necessary.