Rob Munday

Journey into an alien world of bizarre extraterrestrial creatures and mysterious rituals in Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner’s 8-minute animation Scavengers. Created for Adult Swim’s Toonami branch, the duo’s brilliantly inventive film follows a pair of intergalactic explorers who become stranded on an unfamiliar planet when trying to establish a human settlement.

With a narrative that sees its protagonists embark on an epic quest involving a carefully selected sequence of the planet’s inhabitants, Scavengers unravels as if the directorial duo were playing a game of exquisite corpse. With each step taking the narrative in a surprising direction, we follow the titular scavengers until the end of their quest, with the goal of their journey feeling completely unexpected with all that has gone before it.

If you’re a regular visitor to Short of the Week, and a fan of animated shorts, the names Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner are probably already familiar to you. Bennett created one of our favourite animated shorts of 2015 with Odin’s Afterbirth, whilst Huettner’s a founding member of animation collective Late Night Work Club (his film The Jump was one of the highlights of the first omnibus Ghost Stories). If that’s not enough of a Short of the Week connection for you, note that previously featured animator Sean Buckelew and bumper designer Caleb Wood also worked on Scavengers.