Rabbitland

2013 · 7m · Serbia

Directed by Ana Nedeljković, Nikola Majdak jr

Genres: animation, dark comedy, satire

Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal

Brainless rabbits live happily in the ruins of Rabbitland, a perfect democracy where every day they vote for the same representatives and watch the results on television, in a mordant vision of utopia.

Picked by Felix

The scouts

A seven-minute animation that makes political satire feel genuinely *unsettling* by playing it completely straight—rabbits voting for the same representatives over and over, watching it like prime-time entertainment, and somehow this is their idea of perfect democracy. It's the kind of premise that makes you laugh and then immediately feel sick, which is exactly where subversive satire should live.

Felix

Nedeljkovic and Majdak position themselves squarely in the Eastern European animated tradition of mordant allegory, deploying rotoscope technique and deadpan pacing to create a work that functions as both formal exercise and political statement. The restraint of the animation language—rabbits rendered without affect against architectural ruins—becomes the film's most eloquent argument.

Margot

The decision to keep every voting cycle visually and rhythmically identical, down to the identical television broadcast, transforms what could be heavy-handed satire into something hypnotic and genuinely disturbing; it's the *sameness* itself, repeated without comment or variation, that does all the work.

Zoe