When this short started popping up in my Letterboxd feed, I was amused by the title but didn’t see it streaming anywhere. And then I found it on Vimeo but it looked like the “making of” so I shut it off quickly, figuring I’d catch up on it. Then the clip they showed during the Oscars told me, oops, I was wrong. I should have been a better cineaste and done my research. But here we are.

And the short is a very funny existential crisis in stop-motion animation. An office comedy where a drone sees beyond the veil of reality, to the horrific truth at the center of their reality. A howl into the void of an uncaring animation shop universe.

I loved it. A smash-up of the end of The Lego Movie, The Matrix, and Office Space… it’s enough to set off the unstable among us into thinking the world is flat, that other people are NPCs, and maybe the voices in your head are onto something.

Maybe this movie shouldn’t exist. But I’m glad it does. What a lovely bit of animation and meta-animation, showing us how the sausage is made while making the sausage… and then breaking the machinery only to have it all return to normal, howl-into-the-uncaring-universe Funny Games rewind-the-tape style.

Or it’s just a funny li’l movie about cute puppets and the world is a caring, loving place. One with this little gem in it. Glad I caught up with it.

Score: 87