The Twitch
1973 · 13m · Canada
Directed by Al Sens
Genres: animation, dark comedy, satire
Tones: darkly comic, provocative, whimsical
In an animated kingdom where everyone champions opinions harmful to someone else, even the king's nervous tic becomes a test of whether people can accept difference before intolerance lands them all behind bars.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 1973 animated satire that weaponizes a nervous tic as the fulcrum for a referendum on tolerance—it's exactly the kind of premise that makes you wince and laugh simultaneously, and most scouts would've buried it as too on-the-nose, which is precisely why it's brilliant.
Sens situates this work squarely in the tradition of political animation and mid-century satirical fables, with a formal rigor in how the whimsy gradually curdles into darker implications; the restraint of the visual language lets the premise do the ideological heavy lifting.
The film's knockout move is treating the king's twitch not as a plot device but as a visual *refrain*—each recurrence becomes a litmus test, and that single formal choice transforms what could've been preachy into something genuinely unsettling and alive.