We conclude Le Petit Cinéma Club with a spellbinding animation by an up-and-coming filmmaker. Julian Gallese is a Costa Rican animator whose films unfold in surprising and understated ways. His short film Cococo follows a young boy who wakes up and decides to adopt a new pet for his collection at a town fair.

Gallese started to draw Cococo on his commutes back home from work at a commercial animation studio. For him, it was a way “to get something out of [his] system” and “counter the job he had.” His idea was to make a film that was fun even if nothing happened—perhaps, in the same way that his sketches after work provided him with a bit of fun to fend off the boredom of a 9-to-5 commute.

“I want to blend the barriers between cartoons and cinema. Or blend the lines of the familiar with the strange. Cartoons, a language familiar to almost everyone, mixed with more unusual filmmaking conventions was something I was aiming for I think…. It’s also some sort of portrait or longing for the place I’m from that I missed a lot at the time.” JULIAN GALLESE

Many of the characters in Cococo look like variations on popular kids’ characters—from a Donald Duck doppelganger to a Barney lookalike. This is in part due to Gallese’s upbringing in Costa Rica, where he remembers seeing murals of off-brand characters everywhere as a child. But, it’s also part-and-parcel of his desire to blur the lines between the expected and the unusual. His films entertain the surreal, fusing together familiar settings with dream scenarios and taking simple premises in unexpected and fantastical directions.

Julian Gallese is a London-based animator from San José, Costa Rica. His films have been exhibited at festivals and galleries across the globe. These include the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, and the BFI’s Edge of Frame, among others. He has also spoken at several universities and recently worked as an associate lecturer at Bath Spa University in Bath, UK.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. Special thanks to animator Jack Wedge for recommending this film.