Square Roots
2006 · 2m · Canada
Directed by Patrick Doyon
Genres: animation, satire, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
Bombarded through his antenna by an endless stream of electronic messages, an exhausted robot races onward without rest, and only a traffic collision appears capable of halting his frantic pace.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A robot literally getting killed by traffic as the only escape from information overload—it's absurdist corporate satire disguised as sci-fi slapstick, and most programmers would miss the teeth under the gag. Doyon's doing something genuinely weird with the premise: not 'technology bad' but 'the system will destroy you faster than you can stop yourself.'
Doyon's economical animation style and precise pacing situate this within a lineage of NFB experimental shorts that weaponize formal restraint; the collision itself becomes a compositional problem as much as a narrative one, executed with the kind of measured craft that resists sentimentality.
The genius move is the antenna as a visual throughline—every frame of visual noise pouring into this one point makes the robot's exhaustion feel less like plot and more like a lived state, and that single formal choice transforms what could've been a gimmick into something genuinely claustrophobic.