We
1974 · 2m · Canada
Directed by Anastasia Michailidis
Genres: animation, experimental, satire
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
In a wordless animated satire, isolated figures live boxed off from one another even as mass communication becomes a huge industry. A series of brief, colourful sketches mocks suspicion toward difference while questioning modern disconnection.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1974 animated tract on isolation dressed up as satire—competent enough, but the premise does all the heavy lifting and the execution never subverts its own message hard enough to bite back. There's no friction here, no premise that makes you go *wait, WHAT?* because the disconnection-via-communication angle was already the obvious read fifty years ago.
Michailidis positions this squarely in the lineage of social-realist animation and structural satire—the wordless format, the geometric compartmentalization, the parade of color-coded sketches all feel deliberate and restrained, a formal argument about atomization made visible through compositional constraint. This is exactly the kind of film that rewards close looking and positions itself knowingly within animation's tradition of critique.
Two minutes of pure conceptual economy: the decision to strip dialogue entirely and let those colored boxes do all the psychological work is what transforms a fairly standard critique into something that *feels* modern, even now—every isolated figure, every failed connection reads instantly because the form refuses to explain itself.