Things Don't Fit
2013 · United Kingdom
Directed by Tim Divall
Genres: animation, comedy, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, melancholic
In the city, nothing seems to fit or work as it should, and daily life becomes a struggle. A hapless commuter battles subways, offices and elevators until the urban world quite literally unravels around him, and the only refuge left is to curl up inside a desk drawer until things get better.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A film that takes the most tired metaphor in cinema—urban alienation—and actually makes you feel the claustrophobia by literally melting the city around a guy curling up in a desk drawer; most scouts would call this heavy-handed, but Divall's gooey animation somehow earns the absurdity.
Divall's elasticated 2D forms locate themselves in a lineage of expressionist animation that weaponizes form against content, channeling everything from early UPA to contemporary digital morphing, though the premise itself skews closer to greeting-card surrealism than formal innovation.
The decision to render the urban collapse in soft, almost liquid animation rather than sharp geometric breakdown is what sells the emotional core—that gumminess makes the world feel exhausted rather than hostile, which is the whole point and almost no one would've made that choice.
Reviews
Lovely deadpan exaggeration and a plumpy, gooey flair.