Pandas

Opening with a quote from Charles Darwin about fitness that segues to a relatively accurate depiction of the evolutionary progress that left us with the world's most commodified bear-like creature, Pandas is gleeful, brutal, mischievous and funny. Borrowing convention from video-games, its use of an 'Energy Bar' helps maintain a genuine comic rhythm, all animated in a style that's reminiscent of the off-colour mix of stylisation and obscene detail that characterised Ren & Stimpy or informs the output of Robert Crumb, all in lurid colour and messy sound.

Music by Ink Midget is well deployed, but its Matus Vizar's vision that compels. This is bloody, good, perhaps a bit too happy with stereotype in its characterisation of zoos as prisons but so filled with little bits of novelty of presentation that it can be forgiven.

It elicited genuine guffaws from its audience at the 2014 Glasgow Short Film Festival, and that alone should commend it to you - these Pandas won't be the only charismatic megafauna you'll see in the cinema, but they're among the funniest.