The Current
2023 · 4m · Germany
Directed by Julia Alena Schneider
Genres: animation, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
A perfectionist filmmaker experiences harsh creative feedback as a rabbit plunging into a nightmare of self-doubt.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's doing the 'inner turmoil as surreal monster' thing now, and Schneider leans so hard into expected symbolism that the nightmare reads as paint-by-numbers dread—even the rabbit feels like it's checking boxes.
The animation carries deliberate formal sophistication, and there's a lineage here from Svankmajer through contemporary European art animation; Schneider's control of texture and spatial anxiety marks thoughtful command of the medium's psychological vocabulary.
The single choice that makes this work is the sound design's refusal to explain itself—those wet, ambiguous audio textures underneath the visuals create more unsettling specificity than the rabbit metaphor itself could ever manage, which is why you believe the filmmaker's spiral instead of watching it perform.