The Pub
2012 · 6m · Royaume-Uni
Directed by Joseph Pierce
Genres: animation, dark comedy, drama
Tones: dark, provocative, surreal
Over one long evening in a North London pub, a young foreign-born landlady serves a stream of drunken, lecherous and sometimes violent customers, her ordeal rendered in grotesque rotoscoped animation.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Rotoscoped misery as formal experiment—Pierce takes the ugliest night imaginable (predatory pub crawl, no escape) and refuses to let you look away or laugh it off, which is exactly why it works. Consensus would sand down the edges; he leaves them jagged.
The rotoscope technique situates itself deliberately within animation's lineage of social critique (Bakshi, Kovács), though the relentless tonal commitment to degradation occasionally overwhelms formal consideration—the craft serves the provocation rather than achieving equilibrium between them.
The rotoscoping here is the obvious choice that becomes invisible: instead of distancing you from the landlady's humiliation, the painstaking frame-by-frame tracing makes each small gesture of endurance unbearably intimate, a technical decision that transforms what could've been shock value into something that actually cuts.
Reviews
Avec un regard perspicace sur la société britannique et un travail formel remarquable qui s'affine au fil de ses films, Pierce s'affirme indubitablement comme une personnalité importante dans le milieu de l'animation internationale. Véritable délice, The Pub semble être embarqué, comme ses ancêtres, dans la joyeuse tournée des festivals.