The Origin of Creatures
2010 · 11m · Netherlands
Directed by Floris Kaayk
Genres: animation, dark comedy, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, surreal
In the ruins of a post-apocalyptic world, a colony of autonomous body parts labours to build a tower that will bring light to their egg-laying queen, but poor communication dooms their Babel-like mission.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Kaayk takes the tower-building myth and stuffs it full of autonomous body parts laboring under a queen in the dark—it's *absurdist sci-fi* pretending to be worldbuilding, and the joke lands because he commits completely to the grotesque premise without winking. Most scouts see post-apocalyptic and think survival narrative; Felix sees a surreal rebuke of purposeful labor itself.
The formal ancestry here is clear—Bruegel's Babel via creature-design body horror—and Kaayk executes with the kind of controlled visual language that rewards multiple viewings; the Babel structure is earned, not imposed, making this a rare animated short that understands its own cultural weight.
The crucial move is the decision to render *failed communication* as the film's central catastrophe rather than resource scarcity or external threat—that thematic pivot, executed through deliberately fractured creature dialogue and increasingly frantic tower construction, transforms what could've been standard dystopia into something genuinely unsettling.
Reviews
Œuvre fascinante et foisonnante, ce petit bijou d'animation a reçu le prix Format Court au Festival Paris Courts Devant 2011. D'une grande richesse thématique et visuelle, » The Origin of Creatures » n'en finit pas de poser des questionnements, agissant sur son spectateur à plusieurs niveaux de lecture, que ce soit mystique, scientifique ou sociologique.