Violet and Marlowe Rob a Bank
2026 · 3m · United States
Directed by Wesley Wang
Genres: action, animation, sci-fi
Tones: darkly comic, melancholic, theatrical
In the dystopia of Warrenville, husband-and-wife rabbits Violet and Marlowe fight the tyrannical President Rabbit's carrot monopoly with a series of factory heists — an action-packed three-minute animated short with barely a word of dialogue.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Rabbit revolutionaries staging carrot-monopoly heists sounds like it should be twee garbage, but Wang's refusal to lean on dialogue forces the animation to do actual narrative work—and that's genuinely subversive for a premise this absurd.
The theatrical melancholy threading through an action-packed animal heist sits uneasily with genre expectation; it's formally interesting as tonal resistance, though the three-minute constraint may prevent the kind of sustained argument about tone that makes a short linger.
Three minutes with barely a word means every frame of animation and every sound design choice has to *earn* its weight—the decision to trust visual storytelling over exposition in an action short is the kind of constraint-driven clarity that separates competent from unforgettable.
Festivals
- Tribeca Festival 2026, Best Animated Short