Special Delivery
1978 · 7m · Canada
Directed by John Weldon, Eunice Macaulay
Genres: animation, comedy, dark comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, humorous
Ralph ignores his wife's instruction to shovel the front walk, returns to find the mailman dead on his steps, and launches a disastrous cover-up involving mistaken identity, a runaway bride, and a baffled coroner.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 1978 animated short that treats a dead mailman as a escalating farce machine—most scouts would've filed this under 'quaint period comedy,' but Weldon and Macaulay are doing something genuinely perverse with domestic obligation and male incompetence, wrapped in a bouncy cartoon skin that makes the darkness land harder.
Exemplary craft in the Canadian animation tradition: the timing of mistaken identity collisions, the precision of the coroner's bewilderment, the formal economy of a seven-minute narrative that could sprawl but doesn't—this is animation as measured dramatic architecture.
The single masterstroke is the decision to animate the cover-up in real-time escalation without cutting away; each new character stumbling onto Ralph's disaster lands because we're locked in his cramped spatial and temporal logic, and that formal constraint is what makes the absurdity stick.