2025 Oscars Short Film Contenders: ‘La Perra’ Director Carla Melo Gampert
Cartoon Brew is putting the spotlight on animated short films that have qualified for the 2025 Oscars.
In this installment, we’re looking at La Perra (The Bitch) from Colombian filmmaker Carla Melo Gampert. The short earned its Oscars qualification by winning the Golden Gate award for best animated short at San Francisco International Film Festival, best Latin American animation short at Chilemonos, and best animated short at Bogoshorts.
In this brutal yet moving story about the relationship between a mother and a daughter, a bird-girl leaves behind the family home in Bogota, her domineering mother, and her faithful dog to go and explore her sexuality. Thoughts and memories of her dog will accompany the bird-girl along in her difficult journey through life. The film is a co-production between Bogota-based production house Evidencia Films and Paris-based June Films.
Cartoon Brew: Your film depicts a harsh society for female characters, yet in the end unity among them provides a moving conclusion. How has your own experience inspired you to direct this film, and what do you want to convey about the state of society today by sharing it to global audiences?
Carla Melo Gampert: I grew up in Colombia’s sexist society and went to a very classist, moralistic school in Bogotá. I remember the different words you would hear in this environment, in soap operas, and at school: bitch, dog, wolf, chicken… all of them are female animals. I wanted to fit in, I wanted to be a part of my class, to have my first communion like them, and it made me angry that my mother hadn’t even baptized me, for example. At the time, my mother was different; she was independent, a professional bass player, separated… All of that began to filter into my relationship with her, in addition to feeling very alone during my adolescence, a time when I found it very difficult to talk to her. La Perra is a product of the distorted imagination of a girl who judges her mother’s freedom, who takes on the role of the man in the house, the moral police, without being aware of all the complexities and freedoms involved in being a woman. La Perra is the materialization of the companionship and complicity that my mother and I found so difficult. It was proof of how society transforms women into dogs. But bitches are all about love and caring, although it’s difficult to see due to the many social traps that permeate our lives.
What was it about this story or concept that connected with you and compelled you to direct the film?
One day, I was walking my already very aged dog with my mother. We climbed a paved path towards the mountain. My mother looked tired and my dog could barely walk. They were quite similar, in fact: thin, black-haired, brown-eyed, quiet… I thought about old age, about tired bodies, and about the women in my life, who are part of who I am. I saw a black shadow on the cement that spread out from my dog’s body; it was deformed, monstrous, and getting bigger. It seemed to herald an approaching death and this terrified me. Based on that image of her shadow, I knew I needed to do something that would be about the body, time, women, and how society’s gaze sneaks into family ties.
What did you learn through the experience of making this film, either production-wise, filmmaking-wise, creatively, or about the subject matter?
The hand-drawn animation turned out to be deeply generous. As we began constructing the animation, it took its own strange direction. It was a reflection of negotiations between conscious ideas and the surprises that arise from different artistic media. Even though the animation team was instructed to “let go” and draw in “their own style”, in each frame you can feel the universe and the human being behind the drawing. The expressive quality of the drawings speaks of the story. The paper chosen, the way it absorbed the ink, was an unconscious way of talking about aging skin, about the quest to retain liquid inside the skin or the line.
It was also my first project with a team, and I’m very grateful to the animators, to all my fellow ink artists — none of us were animators — and the sound engineers who brought my conga back to life. The story underwent a transformation during its making; it’s not the same as the script. Part of it is personal, but there’s a lot of fiction because of the many hands, ideas, and universes of those who were part of the team. This makes it a bigger story. It’s been so unexpected to see how a hand-drawn animated short film can affect an audience. Some people are moved, others see only the stains and take away the artistic experience, and others are deeply bothered by the film, which I also see as a success. One of the most rewarding things about the process, and the most incredible thing about animation, has been seeing how expressiveness and bodies can translate to different countries, people, and universes, regardless of language.
Can you describe how you developed your visual approach to the film? Why did you settle on this style/technique?
On the one hand, I wanted to play a little with breaking the stereotypical idea of children’s animation. It starts out as a kind of story about a baby chick, then ventures into more uncomfortable and raw places. It’s a constant transformation which is why I decided to use watercolors, for their ambiguity, metamorphic nature, and their expressive and “dirty” possibilities. The ink and watercolor technique creates uncontrollable stains and textures that also narrate independently. I was interested in telling a physical story about a woman’s aging, about the changes, the hair that grows, and the discomfort that this implies in our society. When water passes through it, the ink expands, forming a kind of greenish, hairy texture, and the paper starts to wrinkle the more water you add. Each stroke affects the paper, as if one could touch the skin or the emotion of the characters with each stroke.
I was worried that on the big screen, at 12 frames per second, the ink would vibrate too much and the human eye wouldn’t be able to handle it. But now, looking back, I think it was a fortunate idea because you see how unstable characters, afraid of growing up, struggle to keep from giving up, trying to do their best as mothers or as daughters. In the end, their necks embrace when they finally understand each other as women and support each other as a family.
