The Windshield Wiper
2021 · 14m · United States / Spain
Directed by Alberto Mielgo
Genres: animation, drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
In a café, a man smoking a cigarette poses the question 'What is love?' His musing unfurls into a series of disparate urban vignettes — couples, strangers, lonely passersby — that circle the contradictions of modern connection.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to genuflect at the animation technique and miss that the film itself is basically a greeting-card meditation on love—Mielgo's doing something formally radical in service of the safest question imaginable, which is either brilliant subversion or the most expensive way to say nothing.
That hand-painted 3D aesthetic isn't novelty; it's a deliberate rejection of the slick digital polish that's become animation's default, positioning the work squarely in a lineage of painterly cinema—the stuttered motion and impressionistic rendering transform what could be maudlin philosophizing into something formally austere and genuinely moving.
The stuttered framerate is the whole film: it forces you to *look* at each moment as an object rather than glide through it, and that single decision—refusing fluidity—turns a café conversation into something that actually lands emotionally instead of just technically dazzling.
Reviews
It's probably not the Academy's cup of tea, but Alberto Mielgo's 'The Windshield Wiper' pushes the medium to capture another dimension of the human experience... The film takes us inside his brain, processing all the contradictory feelings in the world around that add up to 'love.' It's impossibly ambitious.
With his animated short The Windshield Wiper, Alberto Mielgo has the potential to add an Oscar to the pair of Emmys that he received in 2019 for his short The Witness from the Netflix animated anthology series Love, Death + Robots.
Festivals
- Academy Awards 2022, Best Animated Short Film (Winner)
- Cannes Film Festival 2021