Violet and Marlowe Rob a Bank (2026)

Wesley Wang's satirical short is a wildly inventive animation about rabbits taking back their carrots.

Set in a world where a tyrannical President Rabbit has monopolised the global carrot supply, Wang's film tells the tale of a husband-and-wife rabbit duo who fight back against the establishment.

Violet and Marlowe is one of those glorious animations in the thematic vein of Team America: World Police (2004), a film that uses child-friendly visuals to create an adult experience in a highly amusing fashion, yet one that doesn't shirk from the subject matter it ultimately portrays. Beneath the whimsical soundtrack and hilariously violent action, the film cleverly uses its frenetic action and brief run time to dig deeper, both literally and figuratively, as it weaves a tale of control, corruption, and resistance, using its lovable protagonists to implant huge smiles on our faces.

In one robbery sequence, Violet and Marlowe escape and cross a road, and for a brief second, you're reminded of the bank heist scene in Michael Mann's Heat, and I don't make that reference lightly. There are some lovely visual touches that are even more impressive considering a run time that doesn't hit three minutes, and perhaps the finest of these is when one of our fluffy friends hits a guard with a keyboard, the individual buttons flying at the screen, coining the phrase 'fuck you.'

It's an ingenious split second in a short that's packed with invention and style and owes much to storyboard artist Alex Salsberg as well as 3D animator Jacob Rivera, a man known for creating universes in Blender—a free 3D open-source creation tool that provided us with the gorgeous Oscar-winning animation Flow last year.

And of course, huge credit must go to twenty-one-year-old director Wesley Wang, whose rise within the industry has been nothing short of astronomical. With Violet and Marlowe, he provides us with one of the most innovative short adult animations you're likely to see, a film that calls to mind the madness of A Town Called Panic (2009) and isn't afraid to nod its head to behemoths such as The Matrix (1999). ★★★★ 8.2/10