Scenes From The City
2022 · 10m · USA
Directed by Luke Strickler
Genres: animation, comedy, satire
Tones: absurdist, humorous, surreal
A 3D-animated tour of a city where the infrastructure is sentient: condos migrate north like geese, traffic lights workshop new color schemes, and the Subway Queen rules the delays. Urban absurdism rendered in cones and payphones.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A whole short where the protagonists are traffic cones and the antagonist runs the MTA. Strickler treats the gag like a nature doc and it pays.
Luke Strickler's 3D animation in absurdist-ethnographic mode — the formal language sounds closer to Don Hertzfeldt than to Pixar, and that's the right neighborhood.
3D-animated absurdism where the infrastructure has interior lives — migrating condos, traffic lights workshopping color schemes, a Subway Queen — Hertzfeldt-energy worldbuilding aimed at the AI-everything moment.
Reviews
Though the big city may appear to be endless concrete and steel, it is teeming with hidden life underneath.