The Bird's Placebo (2026)
There is a lot that is admirable about Rami Jarboui's The Bird's Placebo, a twenty-minute animated short from Tunisia with a genuinely novel story and a real heart to it. It is the sort of film I want to champion, and yet when I step back and weigh it up honestly, it lands squarely in the middle for me. Not bad by any stretch, but really rather average. Two and a half stars.
The film follows a young man in a wheelchair, living in a marginalised neighbourhood of the Tunisian capital, who dreams of crossing the Mediterranean, until a surreal encounter nudges his path in an unexpected direction. It is a premise that quietly folds together a few things we do not see nearly enough of on screen: disability, migration, and the particular ache of yearning for somewhere else when the world has hemmed you in. There is something genuinely inclusive and humane in how it centres a disabled protagonist in a migration story, and I admired the film for reaching for that without ever making a lecture of it.
The look of it is distinctive too. Jarboui works in a mix of rotoscope and 3D animation, and the art style is interesting and unlike much else I have seen lately, with a texture and a strangeness that suits the film's drift into the surreal. When it works, it has a real character to it.
The problem, and it is the thing that keeps pulling me back down to the middle of the scale, is that the animation is really choppy. There is a stiffness and a jerkiness to the movement that, for me, kept recalling a slightly dated video game, the sort of thing you might see running on an ageing console, and it repeatedly knocked me out of the spell the film was trying to cast. I do not doubt it was a deliberate aesthetic to some degree, and on a modest budget the ambition is commendable, but the roughness of the motion undercut the emotional moments more often than it enhanced them.
So I come out of it genuinely torn. The story is strong, the themes matter, and the voice behind it is clearly one to watch, especially knowing it grew from something painful and personal for the director. But as an actual viewing experience it never quite took flight, held back by animation that distracted as much as it impressed. Two and a half stars. The Bird's Placebo is a thoughtful, well-meant and distinctive little film that I respected more than I was swept up by, and I will be curious to see what Jarboui does next with a bit more polish under him.
The Bird's Placebo screens at the BFI London Film Festival as part of the Life / Drawing animated shorts programme.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country Tunisia: Four Daughters (2023), The Man Who Sold His Skin (2020), Moolaadé (2004)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More animation: Babyface (2026)
