Saccage
2018 · 4m · Francia
Directed by Alexandre Boesch-Brassens, Jonathan Breuer, Julie Mansuy, Nicolas Ocipski, Paul Gaulier, Samuel Ramamisoa, Sylvain Masson, William Rima
Genres: animation, comedy, sci-fi
In a futuristic Paris, S.A.M., a garbage-collector robot, chases a plastic bag across the city, ignoring every danger to keep Paris clean.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Eight directors collaborating on a 4-minute robot-chases-trash-bag premise should be a disaster, but Saccage somehow weaponizes that chaos into genuine absurdist comedy—the kind of constraint-breaking mess that actually works.
A formally precise little machine, where the whimsy sits firmly in dialogue with sci-fi pastiche and the editing rhythm carries the weight of the joke; it knows exactly which traditions it's playing with.
The singular stroke here is the decision to make S.A.M.'s obsessive pursuit genuinely touching—that shift from sight gag to something almost poignant in four minutes, achieved through disciplined restraint rather than budget, is what lifts this.