The Brainwashers
2002 · 12m · Canada
Directed by Patrick Bouchard
Genres: animation, experimental, horror
Tones: dark, darkly comic, surreal
Two miniature chimney sweeps are injected into a man's brain and set about scrubbing clean every memory — a claymation nightmare about the violence of forgetting.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Two little chimney sweeps cleaning memories out of a man's brain — Bouchard made claymation feel like a violation of your own skull.
Bouchard's claymation reads as a direct heir to Svankmajer's Czech surrealism — memory rendered as soot to be scrubbed by tiny laborers is a properly disturbing conceit. NFB at its most uncompromising.
Patrick Bouchard claymation where memory is grime to be swept by tiny chimney sweeps — NFB pedigree and a genuinely disturbing puppet logic. Twelve minutes that operationalizes Eternal Sunshine as horror.