The Employment

A man wakes in the morning, dresses and goes to work. The journey looks ordinary but something is wrong: every object he uses is a person. Someone is his bedside lamp, someone is his doormat, someone is his taxi. They all hold still and do their work. The man does not find it strange; nobody does. He reaches his office, goes through the door, and what his own work is becomes visible. Santiago Bou Grasso directs. It is an Argentine production made in animation. It is short; it runs around six minutes and there is not a single line of dialogue. The narrative is built on one idea and completes that idea in its final shot. The style of animation is dark and limited in colour; the drawing is not realistic and the spaces kept empty. The matter it treats is labour turning into an object; the narrative shows it without explaining. It won prizes at many festivals and was widely watched online. Silence is part of the narrative; the sound design consists only of mechanical noise. Its limit is scale; it is a work of one idea and once that idea is known the value of watching again drops. Who it is for: viewers who like short animation and works built on an idea. Who it is not for: it is very short, has no characters, and the point lands once.