Qui veut du pâté de foie ?
2001 · 5m · France
Directed by Anne-Laure Bizot, Amélie Graux
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, dark comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
A frail, mute little boy nicknamed Poulet dreads the end of the school day: his grotesquely gluttonous mother devours everything in sight, including his own snack, and as the family meals swell his anxiety grows — can a child escape his own family?
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A five-minute French animation that turns maternal consumption into body-horror absurdism and somehow makes you laugh while your skin crawls — this is the kind of premise that sounds repulsive on paper and becomes undeniable on screen, which is exactly why everyone else probably passed on it.
Bizot and Graux position themselves squarely in the lineage of Eastern European grotesque animation, with a formal discipline in how they escalate the visual metaphor that recalls the compositional control of Švankmajer or the Quay Brothers.
The decision to keep Poulet completely silent while his mother's consumption becomes increasingly monstrous and anthropomorphic forces the animation itself to carry the emotional architecture — every frame of distortion does the work dialogue could never accomplish on this budget.
Reviews
Angoisse, cruauté, absurdité, bruits de mastication, folie, boulimie, … envahissent ses cinq mini minutes. On adore, on est rebuté, on s'interroge, c'est selon.