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(moulds – teeth – cheeses)

Our Midnight Animation block has a secure spot in the Anifilm programme. Each year, there are many films whose authors use many ways to passionately explore what animated film and its viewers can stomach. This year is no different – we have picked nine such films for you.

Midnight Animation classics include not just traditional (Arachnarche) and psychological (The Expected) horrors, but also ‘yuckies’ for hard-boiled viewers (Subsoil, The Tale of the Green Cheese, Touch), ‘nasties’ for shockproof viewers (Thank You for Your Teeth!) and last but not least also unclassifiable ‘wackies’ which are represented this year by a parodic and absurd Naked juice commercial (Fruit).

Several of the aforementioned labels can be applied to the 20-minute-long ambitious and disturbing film Night Bus, in which several passengers’ ride on the last daytime bus turns into a fight for their very survival.

Arachnarche
Director: Emma Jordan, United Kingdom, 2020, 4 min

The Tale of the Green Cheese
Director: Noah Erni, Switzerland, 2020, 5 min 

The Expected
Director: Carolina Sandvik, Sweden, 2020, 14 min

Touch
Director: Sofja Gorelova, Estonia, 2020, 4 min

Fruit
Director: Ivan Li, Canada, 2020, 4 min

Subsoil
Director: Erica Maradona, Otto Guerra, Brazil, 2020, 8 min

Thank You for Your Teeth!
Director: George ve Ganaeaard, Horia Cucută, Romania, 2020, 3 min 

The Surrogate
Director: Stas Santimov, Ukraine, 2020, 6 min 

Night Bus / 夜車
Director: Joe Hsieh, Taiwan, 2020, 20 min 

In animation, ecology and environmental protection can take various forms. Such topics are particularly interesting in original ‘midnight’ films in which nothing is considered too extreme and environmental stories are often turned inside out and spiced with irony, parody and absurdity. A popular technique switches the roles of victim and aggressor. What if nature deliberately killed people like in the film End of Public Road? Or what if animals had an opulent feast with a human roast like in L'ère bête, an example of extraordinary 3D animation? And what would it look like if women were used for industrial milk production instead of cows (MILK)? You’ll also find out what people could look like in the future if our way of life doesn’t change; what happens behind the closed door of a henhouse (Cockpera); and what a goat thinks about the current situation (Capra Cooked Wild). The horror film Chicken of the Dead and the artistically quirky film Eatself are other representatives of ‘chicken’ films and Thin Ice is a perfect example of a parody.

Wacky, hard-to-grasp, utterly disgusting and more or less perverted stories aren’t limited to just short films. Particularly in recent years, attempts to find out what viewers can stomach can also be seen in feature films. The authors of the Korean film Beauty Water describe their film as ‘the most grotesque horror film of all time’. It was screened in Annecy, and despite its scruffiness, it explores a serious topic.

The film’s plump and unattractive heroine, Ye-Ji, sees a beauty product called ‘Beauty Water’ online and finds out that the journey to find beauty can lead straight to hell. The product is promoted by a woman who shows on a video that when you use Beauty Water, your face will become beautiful. Ye-Ji is hell-bent on doing anything for good looks but when a serial killer suddenly appears, she finds that the more she desires to be beautiful, the more her life is in danger.

This strikingly relevant and visually lively film explores plastic surgery in order to show where a perverted desire for good looks can lead. The film will overload the viewers with fidgety and restless images, disturbing stimuli and dismal sounds accompanied by an atypical and alarming horror story.