Roadkill

The scouts

A four-minute animated meditation on dead roadside animals sounds like the most precious, consensus-approved festival entry imaginable—and yet Baumgardner somehow dodges every maudlin trap, letting the image sit without reaching for meaning, which is the most contrarian move of all.

The formal restraint here—animation in service of genuine quietness rather than spectacle—locates itself in a lineage of experimental shorts that trust the image to carry philosophical weight, recalling the tonal precision of Eastern European animation traditions.

The decision to render this in animation rather than live-action is the entire film: it gives the dead animal a strange, almost abstract dignity, letting us contemplate rather than recoil, and that single formal choice transforms a potentially cloying premise into something that actually earns its tenderness.