Soft Animals
2021 · 4m · United Kingdom
Directed by Renee Zhan
Genres: animation, drama, romance
Tones: melancholic, sensual, surreal
Two ex-lovers cross paths at a train station and, beneath the awkward banality of small talk, almost-forgotten memories and animal instincts come surging back to the surface.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's going to see two exes at a train station and think 'intimate chamber piece'—Zhan's actually making something feral and uncontrollable, where the animation technique itself becomes the instinct, all that erasing and redrawing like muscle memory the body won't let go of.
The draw-erase method positions itself deliberately in the lineage of experimental animation as temporal performance, each frame a palimpsest that echoes both Brakhage's gestural cinema and the Japanese tradition of animated impermanence—formally rigorous in its refusal of the polished.
That single decision—to erase and redraw each frame rather than layering—transforms what could be a familiar emotional beat into something tactile and alive; the technique doesn't illustrate the rekindled attraction, it *is* the attraction, muscle memory made visible.
Reviews
Surreal, Extra Wild Hand-Drawn Animated Short
Festivals
- Toronto International Film Festival 2021
- Annecy International Animation Film Festival 2021
- Edinburgh International Film Festival 2021
- Sundance Film Festival 2022
- SXSW Film Festival 2022