The Regulator
2004 · 16m · France
Directed by Philippe Grammaticopoulos
Genres: animation, dark comedy, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
A man and woman adopt a kit-set child — but choosing the pieces isn't easy, and the child they'd been longing for isn't as perfect as he should have been.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 2004 stop-motion riff on consumer culture and reproductive anxiety dressed up as sci-fi absurdism—it's exactly the kind of premise that makes you wince and laugh at the same time, and it commits to the bit so hard that most festivals would've passed on it.
Grammaticopoulos brings a formally precise grotesquerie to what could've been a one-joke sketch, situating the work in a lineage of European animation that traffics in unsettling domesticity—the craft here is meticulous, even when the subject matter refuses comfort.
The brilliance lives in the constraint: a single editing rhythm that mirrors the assembly-line anxiety of the premise, where each cut feels like another component snapping into place, building dread through the mechanics of the frame itself rather than exposition.