David Firth, creator of our first Saturday Short “Crooked Rot”, receives his second appearance on our site with the eighth episode of his bizarre comedy series, Salad Fingers. (If you haven’t seen the previous seven, don’t worry. There’s no background information you’ll need in order to understand this one.) Whether you laugh so hard you puke, or curl up in the fetal position during this clip, one thing is certain, David is a master of weird.
Category Archives: Saturday Short
SHORT: RABBIT (2005)
DIRECTED BY: Run Wrake
PLOT: A young girl finds a magical dancing idol when she cuts open a rabbit.
COMMENTS: Run Wrake’s Rabbit is a beautifully frightening, and award-winning, parable about greed that taps into the ancient, grim fairy tale tradition of placing children in harm’s way to illustrate a cautionary point. Rabbit, however, turns that motif on it’s head by making the children the villains. With it’s storybook graphics and text labels hovering over background objects as if it were an animated reading primer, Rabbit creates an eight-minute universe we’ve never seen before, one which is so unflinchingly original it can never be recreated. Like a talking fish out of Grimm’s fairy tales, the golden idol is one of those mysterious folklore creatures with it’s own weird rules and a slow-boiling intolerance for human folly that inevitably leads to tragedy for those unwise enough to abuse its patience. The irony of using innocent looking but thoroughly rapacious children in this sordid scenario isn’t done for shock value alone—although it is shocking, delightfully so—but rather speaks to our deepest suspicions about human nature: that we’re corrupt from birth, and must unlearn our instinctive childish badness.
Although it’s no Saw VI, Rabbit contains some quick and absurd violence and gore. If you find any depiction of darling little boys and girls with ponytails and ruddy cheeks slaughtering innocent woodland creatures for personal gain disturbing, no matter how tastefully done,then you’ll probably want to stay away from this one!
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
SATURDAY SHORT: HESPERUS (2006)
War and freezing temperatures lead a race of beings to the brink of genocide in a world ruled by cause and effect. Written, produced, and directed by Danny Zabbal.
SATURDAY SHORT: HEADLESSNESS (2004)
Black, white, and red all over, Luke Gustafson’s bizarre animated short, “Headlessness” is an astounding treat for the curious eye. Music by Gustafson’s band, “On To Greatness”.
SATURDAY SHORT: SLEEP OF REASON (2002)
Although Mike McKown and Jim Towns did not make the list with their film, Prometheus Triumphant: A Fugue in the Key of Flesh, their short, The Sleep of Reason, certainly deserves our recognition. This eerie tale of a weird romance between a doctor and a mental patient is just what we’re looking for.