Hash Import 2026 05 18 12 34

The Terrible Child (1993)

★★½ — The Terrible Child (1993)

Kadiatou Konaté's eleven-minute short comes out of Mali's modest but culturally rich filmmaking tradition, a tradition that was quietly gaining international attention through the early 1990s largely on the strength of directors like Souleymane Cissé and Cheick Oumar Sissoko. Konaté draws on the oral storytelling forms that underpin much of West African narrative culture, here translated into puppet animation rather than live action, which places the film in a relatively rare category for the region at the time. The story itself belongs to a recognisable type of folkloric tale, the supernaturally precocious child whose gifts bring as much disruption as wonder, a figure that appears across Mande and broader Sahelian oral traditions in various forms.

A-Z World Movie Tour Mali Stop-motion reminded me of childhood classic "Charlie Chalk" in a way. A fascinating blend of West African folklore and puppetry. This short film tells the tale of an older woman blessed (or cursed) with a strangely gifted child who arrives already grown, teeth included, with an appetite for raw chicken and a tendency toward chaos. What starts as a whimsical folktale quickly takes a darker turn, exploring themes of fate, parenthood, and the fear of what we cannot control. The puppet work is expressive and inventive, giving real weight to this surreal story. Not only is it a unique cultural artefact, but it’s also gripping in its storytelling economy, packed with meaning in just a few minutes. Highly recommend seeking out if you're into global animation or folk horror-adjacent vibes.

Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1993 | Watched: 2025-07-15

View on Letterboxd →

Related on Movies With Macca

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) arrived at a strange crossroads in American cinema: too modest to be a prestige picture, too unsettling to be a forgettable B-movie. Adapted from Jack Finney’s serialised novel The Body Snatchers and shot at Allied Artists on a budget barely

Fantastic Planet (1973)

René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet (1973) is one of those films that doesn’t really fit anywhere: too cerebral for kids, too odd for animation festivals, too steeped in European political theory for the Saturday-morning slot, and too visually fearless to ignore. A 72-minute French–Czech co-production designed by the

Viy (1967)

Viy (1967) is a strange and almost solitary object in Soviet cinema: a horror film, an actual horror film with monsters and demons and supernatural set-pieces, in a national cinema that mostly didn’t make horror at all. Officially endorsed by Mosfilm and based on a Nikolai Gogol folktale, it

Alice in Wonderland (1951)

Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951) is the studio’s middle-period work par excellence: technically polished, commercially tested, narratively cautious, and just slightly off. Made between two of Disney’s commercial successes (Cinderella in 1950, which had rescued the studio from one of its periodic financial near-misses, and Peter Pan

Read more

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Fantastic Planet (1973)

Viy (1967)

Alice in Wonderland (1951)