15/07/2025 - Blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, Frederic Siegel’s surreal animated short recalls the familiar parental warning about the dangers of television

“Don’t watch so much TV or you’ll get square eyes”, moms used to say. Don’t show them Frederic Siegel’s gripping vortex of fictional worlds in his latest animated short, or after all these years, they’ll triumphantly add: “I told you so.”

The Swiss animation TV or The Disturbance on Forest Hill Road (2025), directed by Frederic Siegel and recently presented in the Short Films from Around the World section at Fest Anča in Žilina, Slovakia, highlights the way excessive TV can distort reality and blur boundaries between fiction and reality. While staying at his grandmother’s, six-year-old Diego watches so much TV that he gets “square eyes”. Literally. As his screen time spirals out of control, fictional characters and events begin to seep into reality via all screens in the apartment block. One neighbour experiences the crisp chill and dangers of the Arctic through his new plasma. Another fights off characters from a video game. While Grandma herself enjoys a surprisingly intimate tête-à-tête with a TV chef. And when police officers Kim and Mike arrive to handle a noise complaint, they must confront this bizarre, blended reality.

Although many films have explored similar themes – media saturation, blurred reality and screen-based distortion – The Disturbance literalises the intrusion into life in uniquely absurd ways. It achieves this by juxtaposing its clean visual style with the surreal mutation of everyday spaces – screens, homes, routines – into portals of absurdity, fright or even transcendence.

Visually, this 2D animation is clean and polished with a balanced aesthetic and poster-like look. With last year’s I Saw the TV Glow, directed by Jane Schoenbrun, and now The Disturbance, it has been decided – TV glows and consumes its viewers in purple. Siegel controls his colour palette along with careful, geometric compositions and clean layouts of the backgrounds to then contrast it with his characters, designed to feel both mundane and subtly exaggerated. With distinctive linework, stylised features – eyes and posture do a lot of the acting – and surreal tones, the film’s style seems to echo the early 2000s Cartoon Network era, brilliantly playing upon the tropes and familiar narrative forms as portals to breakdown. There’s also a bold juxtaposition of jazz and metal that underscores mood swings and genre-blending themes for a unique auditory experience.

The Disturbance is also surprisingly philosophical and emotional. Beneath its glitchy surface and laughter lies something more unsettling: a critique of screen culture with a hint of nostalgia, leaving us with rather ambiguous emotions. Siegel’s world isn’t just funny – it’s also fragile. Timelines fracture, characters shift roles and nothing is solid. Turn it all off, go outside and apparently, listen to your parents.