Manivald (2017)

Short-form animation rarely gets the attention it deserves, and festival circuit shorts even less so, but Manivald (2017) is the kind of oddity that tends to find its audience eventually, usually through word of mouth from someone who watched it at two in the morning and couldn't quite believe what they'd seen. Running at just thirteen minutes, the film comes from a genuinely unusual co-production arrangement: Estonian, Croatian and Canadian studios pooled resources to bring the project to life, with Canada's National Film Board (the ONF/NFB, a long-standing backer of unconventional short animation) among the partners. It's a reminder that some of the more interesting animated work happening right now is not coming out of the big studios but from smaller, internationally collaborative setups working on a fraction of the budget.

The film was written and directed by Chintis Lundgren, an Estonian animator based in Croatia whose work tends to sit at the intersection of comedy, queerness and a certain dry, central-European sensibility. Manivald is one of her best-known shorts, and it picked up a fair amount of attention on the animation festival circuit after its release. The premise is straightforward enough on the surface: a fox named Manivald is in his early thirties and still living at home with his mother, a domestic situation that gets significantly more complicated when a young wolf named Toomas arrives to fix the washing machine. What follows is the kind of comedy of manners, desire and domestic dysfunction that is easy to pitch but considerably harder to pull off. Lundgren also contributes to the voice cast alongside Trevor Boris, France Castel, Draško Ivezić and Tyrone Benskin. For anyone who's spent time with other animation shorts of this era, there's a recognisable ambition here to use the freedom of the form to tell stories that live-action might approach more cautiously. The The OceanMaker and Josep are good examples of that same impulse working in quite different directions.

The Canadian co-production element is worth noting too, given the NFB's long history of backing animation that pushes against convention. It's a tradition going back decades, and you can trace that spirit of institutional risk-taking through a wide range of projects, including something as formally inventive as the short History of the World in Three Minutes Flat, made under the same banner. Whether Manivald lives up to that legacy is, of course, a matter for the viewer. The film certainly arrives with a particular idea of what it wants to be: a queer romantic comedy with anthropomorphic characters, a slightly absurdist tone, and a willingness to go places a more cautious production would sidestep. How well all of that lands is what we're here to find out.

A-Z World Movie Tour Estonia I expected this to start off like a secret romance coming out story. In the end was a hot ripped bi-fox shagging both mother and son whilst simultaneously having a wife and kids. The message made absolutely no sense. On top of that, the animation is super basic.

I came to this one as part of my A-Z World Movie Tour, which has taken me to some genuinely surprising places, and Estonia via a Canadian co-production was not where I saw the day going. The thing is, when a short film signals one kind of story in its opening moments and then takes a very sharp left turn, you need the craft to earn that pivot, and for me that craft just wasn't here. The animation style is part of what sells or sinks something this short, and when it's working against you rather than with you, thirteen minutes can feel longer than it has any right to. If you're after animation from around the same period that does something more satisfying with its running time, Luigi is worth a look. Sometimes a short film surprises you. This one surprised me, just not in the way I was hoping for.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 2017  | Watched: 2025-06-13

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