GOCRITIC! Anifilm Liberec 2026
– A blind fish and a predatory mantis shrimp push each other’s limits in Bára Anna Stejskalová’s sensitive and strange animated short
Director Bára Anna Stejskalová’s stop-motion short film 9 Million Colours takes viewers on an unusual underwater musical journey through connection and clashing perspectives between sea creatures. Premiering at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in 2025 and now screening in the Short Film Competition at Anifilm in Liberec, this Czech-French-Norwegian-Slovak co-production spins an eccentric story about friendship that is unexpectedly tender.
Confidently establishing a strange yet inviting aquatic universe, an orchestra of crabs snap their claws in rhythmic unison. Their choreography is abruptly interrupted by the arrival of Fran, a predatory mantis shrimp whose instinctive urge to rip apart any living creature introduces a darker undercurrent. Despite these violent impulses, Fran’s oversized eyes and bright, candy-coloured design keep the tone playful, creating a compelling tension between innocence and cruelty. Fran appears to be aesthetically fascinated by destruction, finding beauty in severed fins and broken shells, which burst into kaleidoscopic explosions of colour through her eyes. Quite like Fran, the real mantis shrimp possesses up to sixteen photoreceptors and can perceive ultraviolet and circularly polarised light. This is imagined in the film through a sensory world of visual intensity.
Fran soon encounters Milva, a blind fish whose pale, nearly colourless body stands in luminous contrast to the saturated bioluminescent ecosystem around them. In a world overflowing with vivid hues and organic textures, Milva feels almost spectral. Unaware of Fran’s violent tendencies, the fish forms an unlikely bond with the shrimp. Eager to share her experience of beauty, Fran becomes determined to help Milva “see” the world as she does. Yet this desire is complicated by a more possessive impulse to impose her own perception onto Milva. To bridge the gap between them, Fran cuts out a crab’s eyes and lends them to Milva. Together, the pair journey across the marine world atop a seahorse, accompanied by chirping insect-like melodies and whimsically bubbling soundscapes by Tomáš Dvořák (Floex).
The tension between their perspectives is visualised through shifting visual languages. Milva perceives the world in soft monochromatic hues, while Fran experiences reality as an ecstatic overload of colour. Through this, the visuals operate across multiple visual registers: the shared underwater landscape, Fran’s explosive sensory field, and Milva’s subdued interiority. Although the contrast in perspectives inevitably emerges into conflict once Milva becomes aware of Fran’s disturbing acts of violence, the narrative ultimately arrives at a heartening finale, which concludes that friendship is about accepting the irreducible differences in how each being moves through the world.
Across its 15-minute runtime, the immersive miniature universe comes alive while textured coral landscapes and whimsical creature design create a richly layered ecosystem. 9 Million Colours is a charmingly strange and visually inventive short that leaves viewers with a little more empathy and perhaps a sharper awareness of the odd ways love asks us to see each other.
