The Barewolf
2010 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Valère Lommel, Joke Van Der Steen
Genres: comedy, coming-of-age, fantasy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, whimsical
A young werewolf from a savage, quarrelsome pack chases pink flamingos far from home and blunders into the unfamiliar world of humans.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A werewolf chasing flamingos into suburban life is exactly the kind of premise that makes people uncomfortable because it refuses to pick a lane—part creature-feature body horror, part deadpan pastoral comedy, entirely uninterested in what you expect from either genre.
The formal precision of the animation and the deliberate tonal oscillation between savage pack dynamics and absurdist human encounter situates this within a careful lineage of European animation that treats the grotesque and the mundane with equal compositional weight.
The decision to make the werewolf's transgression not violence but wonder—chasing flamingos, getting lost in the quotidian—transforms what could be a stock creature-feature into something tender and specific, all on what's clearly a modest budget.