The Close

The scouts

A cul-de-sac comedy about people failing at normal life sounds like every suburban satire ever made—until you realize the absurdism isn't commentary, it's just *how these people exist*, and suddenly the whole thing feels genuinely uncanny in a way that makes you uncomfortable laughing.

The animation carries echoes of comedic formalism—there's a deliberate control to how chaos is staged—but the film's real inheritance is less a tradition than a calculated rejection of one; it knows what suburban comedy *should* be and refuses the shape entirely.

The specific choice here is rhythm: instead of building gags, Blades lets mundane failures unfold in real-time with no editorial mercy, and that refusal to cut for mercy is what transforms a modest premise into something that lands like a punch.

Reviews

Very few animated short films actually make you laugh out loud, but this new film from UK character comedy master Ant Blades and Birdbox Studio in London, does it so often the 10-minute running time just seems to fly by. Blades, who has stated that his primary aim across all his projects is simply "to be funny", brings all the trademarks of his previous films to The Close, including his preference for character expression and silent comedy pacing over dialogue.