Super Mr. Woods
2025 · 2m
Directed by Aerin Wu
Genres: animation, experimental, satire
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, surreal
In a rapidly advancing, commercialized society, a mystic forest creature takes on various forms amid the wild idolization of the public. A rotoscoped glimpse into an absurd world that closely resembles our own.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A mystic forest creature getting devoured by celebrity worship in a rotoscoped fever dream—this is the kind of premise that makes consensus programmers squirm, which is exactly why it works. Wu's absurdist satire refuses the earnest environmental fable you'd expect and instead asks something weirder: what if the thing we're destroying is also complicit in its own spectacle?
The rotoscope technique here grounds an experimental conceit with a deliberate formal rigor that recalls Bakshi's lineage, though Wu's approach feels more restrained, more meditative—there's a crafted distance between the hand-drawn form and the commercial chaos it depicts that suggests real consideration of medium as meaning.
The decision to rotoscope a creature that's constantly shape-shifting—forcing the form to hold something fundamentally unstable—creates a visual tension that carries the entire film's critique without a word of dialogue; that single formal constraint is what makes the satire bite rather than preach.
Reviews
From a distance, this constant motion feels frantic and absurd, and that inspired me to create Mr. Woods, a mysterious creature who represents the tension between such hope and frenzy.