26/12/2025 - In her latest short, Swiss animator Aline Höchli takes viewers on an amusing dental journey

At the start of Swiss animator Aline Höchli's fourth short film Caries, a grey Neanderthal-like creature, with a face that looks as if Picasso had painted it, is drawing her first sketch on a white, cave-like wall. Ivory pyramids rise around her, and the ground becomes mushy pink, transforming the surroundings into an oral landscape. The tongue turns into a river, the teeth mountains and the drawings become a form of tooth decay, evoking the destructive side of human nature rather than stone-age evolution.

Höchli's previous short films – most recently, the Warsaw IFF award-winner Why Slugs Have No Legs (2019) – explore themes of work-related hardship and day-to-day struggles, whereas her new one – which premiered at Sundance, and now screened at Animateka – portrays these simple issues from the perspective of the culprit.

Every day, the grey creature – who lives inside a red-haired weather forecaster’s mouth – dives into a decayed tooth to collect black paint and tint the tooth with mesmerisingly disturbing doodles. When the weatherman decides to go to the dentist, the source of the creature’s creativity suddenly disappears – but not for long.

Despite the bland palette that dominates the 10-minute film – not pastel, more like washed-out watercolours – and a rather simple animation style, the visuals impress with their bizarrerie. Yellow toxic fumes fill the interior of the mouth, inter-dental morsels feed the monsters and black fleas cover the tongue with a slick white coating.

The environment resembles the Paleolithic era, when drawings on cave walls marked the dawn of abstract thought for Homo sapiens. Yet the cavity-monsters possess a more analytical mind, drawing mathematical equations on the toothy tabula rasa. Given this correlation between the monsters and humans, it is hard not to root for their artistic development. The red-haired weatherman's acute agony does not, therefore, arouse too much sympathy.

If Hóchli wanted to promote Caries as an oral health-care awareness ad, then she has failed. The black cavity-monsters – one wearing lovely yellow shoes, one a sheep-like coat, another two in matching, ashen attire – mainly evoke empathy... though perhaps they would not do so if located in one’s own mouth.