By Jordan Crucchioa

“Animation is kind of subversive of reality, so I think it’s the mother of cinema,” says writer-director Jan Saska, whose work Hurikán is playing in the 2025 Sundance Film Festival’s Animated Short Film Program, and each of his fellow filmmakers in attendance the Library Center Theater on January 24 seem to agree. Unlike live-action, the limits of what animation can achieve are bound only by the imagination. This is how audiences can watch a slate of films that take them into a hallucinatory rave in the middle of the Argentinian countryside, the mouth of a TV meteorologist, and a wild beer run by a human pig who just can’t catch a break. These are the filmmakers and works of the Animated Short Film Program. 

Flower Show — Filmmaker Elli Vuorinen is not in attendance for the premiere of Flower Show, but it takes the audience on two overlapping journeys as we watch a flower show unfold at a garden party. As plants are stomped on and carelessly picked apart by revelers, so too is a young girl set upon by the leering crowd, as Vuorinen illustrates the parallel between objects of beauty cultivated for exploitation and enjoyment. 

Inkwo for When the Starving Return — For her short film, director Amanda Strong was inspired eight years ago by the graphic novel Wheetago War Roth by Richard Van Camp, about insatiable beasts that terrorize the earth after being disturbed by industrial development. “When I read Richard’s story I felt like it was important to talk about our truths as Indigenous people in Canada,” says Strong, who loves to work in animation because it allows artists to “access our dreams, to access other worlds.” The film follows a gender-shifting warrior named Dove who protects her people from a swarm of dangerous creatures through the use of a medicine called Inkwo. “The stories are not just myths,” Strong tells the premiere screening’s audience. They’re not just monsters. This is our truth.”

Luz Diabla — In Luz Diabla, a raver is headed to a party when his car crashes in the Argentinian countryside. He wanders into a dark inn where locals warn him of danger in the night, and when he leaves back into the dark he happens upon an extravagant dance party that’s popped up seemingly out of nowhere. The raver is having the time of his life, but there will be a price for not heeding the warning he was given.  

“Luz Diabla tells the story about a light you see in the countryside that is like a pagan myth,” explains director Gervasio Canda. His fellow director Paula Boffo adds, “This film is really rooted in our culture, but also what makes us uncomfortable with ourselves as city people, so we wanted to make an uncomfortable thing for ourselves in that sense.” On why she appreciates the creative freedom provided by animation, Boffo says, “When you say anima you’re talking about soul. Animation is not about moving stuff. It’s about giving soul to things in an interesting way.”

Caries — The inspiration for Aline Höchli’s Caries dates back to the filmmaker’s childhood, when her dad would act out the character of mouth bacteria fighting against toothpaste as his children brushed their teeth. In her short film, Höchli has changed her main character from angry bacteria to a shaman who is painting murals in the mouth of a weather presenter, and seemingly causing his teeth to rot. The director-artist is not present for the screening, but she does leave audiences wondering if that feeling between their teeth might be a tiny artist hiding in their gums.

Field Recording — Filmmaker Quinne Larsen says there is something “visceral” about animation, and her short film Field Recording feels like a dream being shared in raw form. Larsen is Chinook and did not learn the language until later in her life, and Field Recording is a personal work that deals with the topic of language and what it means to a people. “I didn’t ever really expect it to have this kind of audience,” Larsen says. “It was kind of this smaller film that was a little more vulnerable than I would have necessarily made with a larger audience in mind.”

Como si la tierra se las hubiera tragado — “Animation entered my life in a period where I was very frustrated with what I was creating, because everything I was imagining was not conceivable,” filmmaker Natalia León tells the audience. “So I think animation allowed me to find this complete freedom in creating.” The subject of León’s film stems from her childhood in Mexico, where she says her parents protected her from the violence that surrounded her. When León was 17 she moved to France to pursue her studies and it was there she started to gain a different perspective on the reality of her home compared to how she experienced it. In her short, León’s primary character is returning to her home in Mexico and connecting signs for missing women and girls to ones she saw as a small child and realizing what she’s witnessed.

León’s protagonist is channeling the filmmaker’s own coming to terms with this epidemic of missing persons. ”I started doing a lot of research just because I wanted to understand,” says the writer-director. “This research brought a lot of very negative emotional feelings. I developed this anxiety and a lot of fear to walk on the streets and to be surrounded by people. So this film was a way for me to express all those feelings that I had.”

Paradise Man (ii) — When director Jordan Michael Blake started working on Paradise Man (ii) he was driving around the United States amid the lockdowns of 2020. He kept a journal throughout that time and eventually wanted to turn those jotted down thoughts into a film. “It’s about going inside your mind and looking at your feelings,” says Blake, who likes the absence of “logistical restraints” in making animation compared to live action film. For this short, Blake used stock animated gifs and created a story around them that deals with topics like loss, depression, endless love, and the feeling of hitting a hole in one. “I think animation is a lot of the time a sort of soft space to be in. It’s not so empirical,” the filmmaker tells the audience. “And because of that I think it invites you to feel things in a certain way that I really like.”

Hurikán — “I don’t know who said it, but I like it: Animation is like saying a joke, and then you have to wait two years before anybody starts to laugh,” this is how Hurikán director and co-writer Saska introduces himself to the audience after the debut of his short film. The piece follows a man-pig hybrid who is stopping by a drink truck for a cold beer, but when the keg runs out and he accidentally breaks half the bottles in the fridge, he ruefully volunteers to acquire a replacement keg to make up for the trouble he’s caused. But a simple beer run turns into a huge misadventure in this short film that was inspired by action movie tropes like bar fights and police chases. Viewers will find both in Hurikán, which is a brief riot of a time. On why he likes to work in this format, Saska says, “Sometimes animation can hack reality, and that is a powerful thing.”