Save Ralph
2021 · 4m · España
Directed by Spencer Susser
Genres: animation, documentary, satire
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
Ralph, a laboratory test rabbit, is interviewed about his job and explains how he is experimented on in a laboratory, in a stop-motion short about the use of live creatures to test cosmetics.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 4-minute stop-motion interview with a cosmetics test rabbit should be unbearable—cute animal, heavy-handed message, the works—but Susser flips it into something genuinely unsettling by letting Ralph own his own complicity, which is exactly the kind of subversive premise that makes everyone else uncomfortable and Felix vindicated.
The film's restraint in framing—a single subject interview format in stop-motion—deliberately echoes documentary tradition while the medium itself becomes the critique, a formally aware gesture that situates the work within both animation lineage and the broader essay-film canon.
The decision to have Ralph articulate his exploitation with mundane professionalism rather than pathos is the hinge on which everything turns; that one tonal choice transforms what could be maudlin into something that actually penetrates, and you can feel how deliberately Susser withheld the emotional beat everyone expected.