The Horror And Glory Of Human History Told In Five Minutes In Theo W. Scott’s ‘Cuties’

The best and worst of humanity, past, present, and future, is playfully animated in the five-minute short Cuties from British filmmaker Theo W. Scott.

Kicking off in the primordial muck, Cuties tracks human evolution, physically and culturally, over centuries of warfare, famine, and competition. Hand-drawn characters eventually give way to pixel art figures as the short predicts a potential digital evolution on the horizon. In the end, though, we see that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Cuties was funded by the British Film Institute and screened at numerous festivals, including Annecy, Sitges, and the Manchester Animation Festival. It won the U.K.’s Royal Television Society Professional Excellence: Animation award and best animated film at the British Short Film Awards.

Scott is a filmmaker to keep an eye on and has been singled out as one of the country’s most ambitious young filmmakers by the BFI, which teamed with Film Hub North to back production of Cuties.