The Quintet of the Sunset
2019 · 8m
Directed by Jie Weng
Genres: animation, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, surreal, whimsical
Five cats with distinguished personalities live out their lives at sunset, seen from the first-person perspective of an animal, in a fantastical world where cats become assassins and superstars.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Cats-as-assassins-and-superstars is the kind of premise everyone else would reject as twee, but Weng commits to it with such deadpan surrealism that it actually becomes unhinged—the sunset framing and first-person animal POV twist what could've been cute into something genuinely disorienting.
The formal restraint here is exceptional: an 8-minute meditation on five distinct personalities playing out against a single temporal anchor (sunset), structured with the precision of a chamber piece where animation becomes portraiture rather than spectacle.
That first-person animal perspective is the fulcrum—it reframes every cat interaction from a viewpoint we can't quite triangulate, forcing the animation to do the work of unreliable narration, which turns a whimsical premise into something that actually breathes with uncertainty.