Yowie And The Magpie
2008 · 4m · United Kingdom
Directed by Dylan White
Genres: animation, dark comedy, fantasy
Tones: darkly comic, mythic, whimsical
A son recounts the legend of his father, an avid hunter whose trophy collection lacked only one mythical beast - the Yowie, the abominable apeman of Australian Aboriginal folklore. His obsession seals his fate in this darkly comic animated tale of man versus monster, made for Film London / UK Film Council Pulse Digital Shorts.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A hunter's obsession with a cryptid from Aboriginal mythology becomes his undoing—it's the kind of premise that shouldn't work (man vs. legend, told through his son's retelling), but White commits to the absurdist logic so completely that the darkness lands like a punch.
The film sits comfortably in a lineage of darkly comic fables, animated with formal restraint; the framing device of a son's recounting gives it a classical storytelling spine that elevates what could have been mere genre exercise.
The decision to filter the entire myth through the son's voice—making us complicit in a legend we're inheriting rather than witnessing—transforms a straightforward hunter-versus-monster story into something intimate and unsettling, done on what had to be a modest budget.
Reviews
Bright and clean is White's illustrator-style and it a pleasure to behold, yet the tale itself is wickedly dark and powerfully written by screenwriter Tim Telling. White's visual imagination however, when recounting the myth of the Yowie or in the shot pictured above, exhibits a splendid sense of design and whimsy.