Ruben Leaves
2015 · 5m · Switzerland
Directed by Frederic Siegel
Genres: animation, comedy, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, whimsical
On his way to work, Ruben is haunted by obsessive thoughts about the front door and the stove, and his increasingly absurd imagined scenarios begin to merge with reality.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A five-minute animation that weaponizes intrusive thoughts and OCD spirals into actual surrealist horror-comedy—most scouts would call this 'relatable anxiety humor,' but Siegel's doing something weirder, letting the absurd scenarios genuinely *infect* reality until you can't tell which side of the door Ruben's actually on.
Siegel positions himself within a clear lineage of anxiety-as-animation (think Genndy Tartakovsky's neurotic precision) while maintaining formal control through the escalation structure, where each imagined catastrophe is rendered with increasing visual specificity—the editing rhythm is what sells the conceptual merger.
The masterstroke is the decision to animate the intrusive thoughts in the *same visual language* as the 'real' sequences rather than distinguish them; that single choice—collapsing the stylistic boundary—turns a modest premise about door-checking into something that feels genuinely destabilizing on a five-minute budget.
Reviews
Frederic Siegel takes this relatable and universal experience and develops it into a fascinating and unique narrative with his his 5-minute film Ruben Leaves.