Content warning: This piece includes descriptions of torture and sexual assault.
The story of 2021’s Annecy-winning short film Bestia begins with a game of fetch. Our porcelain protagonist and her fluffy German Shepherd stand atop a green hill, facing each other from opposite sides of the frame, when she throws a twig for the dog to retrieve. When paused, director Hugo Covarrubias’ dwarfish compositions form a pretty picture, but there’s something very unsettling about his objects in motion. Maybe it’s the doll’s blank, expressionless face. Or maybe it’s the ominous score, which begins as the film’s title appears over her head, against the pale blue sky. Whatever it is, it’s letting us know that we’re up for something far more sinister than the cutesy character designs of Covarrubias’ stop-motion figurines would suggest.
From there, the next 14 minutes of Bestia consist of the porcelain lady and her canine going about their daily routines. These include a quotidian breakfast, an office job at what appears to be some kind of law enforcement agency, trips to an underground bunker where she forces the dog onto prisoners, evening cunnilingus between the two, and — finally — some distressing nightmare sequences to end the day.
The next morning, they rinse and repeat.
When I rented Bestia on Vimeo to catch up on the 94th Academy Award nominees in January, I went into the film knowing nothing, except that it was a Chilean production. Very quickly did I realize it was going to have something to do with the country’s military dictatorship. As is the case with most silent animation, the film’s strong visual narrative spells out the main takeaways for viewers; you don’t need to know anything about Chile’s history to understand that this takes place during an oppressive regime — perhaps someplace in South America, going by a Spanish newspaper clipping that appears later. It’s only upon reading more about the Latin American country that you discover that the film is based on a real person: Íngrid Olderöck, a secret police agent who was responsible for many human rights violations during Augusto Pinochet’s infamous rule.
Chile has become one of the most distinguished exporters of Latin American animation over the last few years, with much of the recognition geared towards (but not limited to) three major films. These are the aforementioned Bestia, 2014’s Oscar-winning short Bear Story, and 2018’s The Wolf House — a feature-length horror dubbed “one of the darkest animated movies ever made.” Though they are quite different from each other in genre, production, and visual style, all three films reckon with the country’s darkest period in modern history, taking full advantage of the medium’s narrative capabilities to chilling effect.
Understanding the full scope of Chile’s fascist period is essential to understanding the significance of its animation industry’s growth. The dictatorship began in 1973 with the military’s overthrow of then-president Salvador Allende and lasted 17 years. During this time, the country was ruled by a military junta, headed by General Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet’s junta dissolved the Congress, suspended the 1925 constitution, and banned all leftist parties. It also led a campaign of imprisonment, torture, harassment, and murder against perceived dissidents.
“Torture” under Pinochet included everything from waterboarding and electric shocks to extreme beatings and even rape. Olderöck herself was known for raping prisoners by unleashing her dog, Volodya, onto them (among other forms of abuse). But the most common torture mechanism employed during the era of Pinochet was “disappearing” dissidents by holding them in secret bunkers where they were subjected to such abuses and never seen again. Other state-sponsored violence during this time included Chile’s infamous detention centers like Colonia Dignidad — an isolated colony formed by German Nazis where dissidents were tortured, forced into hard labor, and murdered.
The dictatorship ended with the election of Patricio Aylwin in 1990, but Pinochet continued to serve as Commander-in-Chief of the Army until 1998. In addition to the tens of thousands of prisoners who were tortured during the nearly two decades he was in power, Chile experienced a genocide of sorts, with over 3,000 deaths and disappearances, and the exile of over 200,000 folks to other countries. The effects of this tumultuous period are still felt today, with hundreds of thousands of Chileans affected by “extreme trauma,” according to a 2002 report from the Latin American Institute on Mental Health and Human Rights.
Pinochet’s suppression of cultural dissidence also extended to the arts, with the military taking control of all mass media by blacklisting musicians, holding public book burnings, forcing university theater groups to only perform classics, and changing radio frequencies to middle wavelengths in order to stop Chileans from listening to content from the outside world. Artists who were considered a threat were persecuted, with many bands and musicians forced into exile and imprisonment.
With this in mind, animation is just one of many creative industries that have been linked to Chile’s transformation in the three decades since Pinochet’s rule. According to Variety, local industry professionals attribute this to both an increase in the government’s funding of the arts and an “urgency of creation” among locals. Currently, there are seven film schools in Santiago — the country’s capital — alone. Prior to 1994, the only animated film to come out of the country was 1965’s Érase una vez, but Chile has since produced 57 animated movies, making it one of the biggest exporters of this medium in Latin America.
It’s only natural that people in a relatively newfound democracy would feel an inclination towards the arts after their freedom of expression had been suppressed for so long. In fact, fiscal support of creative industries has long been linked to upward mobility of civilizations on both a large and small scale. Not only do they stimulate local economies by creating employment and investment opportunities (as is reportedly happening in Chile); they also have the power to create accord within communities by serving as expressive and rehabilitative outlets. As a powerful form of communication, art can also increase awareness of social issues and aid important movements.
The great thing about animation specifically is that it serves as a vessel to tell intricate stories without the hurdle of excessive verbiage. Because the nature of the medium prioritizes visuals above all else, it lends itself to aesthetic poetry and allegorical imagery more than perhaps any other form of movie-making.
Of the three films I’ve mentioned, two — Bestia and The Wolf House — feature real-life characters that are notorious to Chile’s history: the aforementioned Íngrid Olderöck, and Nazi child rapist and head of Colonia Dignidad Paul Schäfer (no relation to the author of this essay), respectively. Both their backstories are so perverse they seem pulled right out of German folklore — which is probably why Wolf House directors Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña and co-writer Alejandra Moffat chose to tell a story centering on the Nazi sect through the loose retelling of The Three Little Pigs, Little Red Riding Hood, and other fairy tales.
A daunting piece of experimental art that’s difficult to summarize, The Wolf House presents itself as a faux “educational film” made to indoctrinate the children of Colonia Dignidad. Founded in the early ‘60s, the notorious Nazi settlement rose to prominence as a religious center and a community of prestigious outsiders. Behind closed doors, however, Colonia Dignidad physically and sexually abused its own members and committed a number of weapons violations before becoming a notorious torture camp during the 1970s. The Wolf House then tells the cautionary tale of a girl who, after getting punished for losing three pigs, escapes the sect and takes refuge in an abandoned cabin in the woods. This soon becomes its own nightmare when María finds the lost pigs and attempts to civilize them for company. All the while, the threat of a sinister presence looms behind the house’s walls, tormenting the family.
To anyone familiar with Colonia Dignidad, the film serves as a fascist allegory and an indictment of both the sectarian community and, to an extent, the country’s military dictatorship. After all, both power structures oppressed their constituents by instilling in them an allegiance to their authoritative powers and a fear of the outside world. The film’s experimental nature makes it less a coherent narrative than an unholy fever dream that evokes uncomfortable feelings and connotations rather than spelling them out for viewers. Filmed across multiple art installations, its stop-motion is made of mixed mediums — papier-mâché dolls, paintings that move across walls, and so on. The characters constantly melt and unravel, changing dimension and form to mystifying effect.
2014’s Bear Story tells a fable too, albeit in a much more accessible way. Easily the most digestible and family-friendly of the three films, Gabriel Osorio’s short tells the story of an anthropomorphic bear who is separated from his wife and child to live in a circus. Told in beautiful CG animation, it’s quite the tearjerker, as it’s implied at the end that the bear has yet to be reunited with his family. The story is inspired by director Gabriel Osorio’s grandfather, Leopoldo Osorio, who, after the coup, was separated from his family and imprisoned for two years before being forced to live in exile for the duration of the dictatorship. Its title is also a play on words: the director’s last name is Osorio but oso is also “bear” in Spanish.
The same way animation often functions as a vehicle for social and political allegory, fables themselves are also suited to historical fiction because they’re concise stories meant to teach a greater lesson. Since they typically center on fictional creatures and other anthropomorphic forces of nature, their tropes are also rife for awe-inspiring visual interpretations. The same way George Orwell’s Animal Farm satirized Stalinism in 1945, filmmakers are using animation to reckon with Chile’s history by way of magical realism — a device often associated with Latin American authors like Chile’s own Isabel Allende.
What makes all three of these films particularly impressive is how effective they are even to anyone who doesn’t know anything about Chilean history. Bestia and The Wolf House barely pay their real-life subjects lip service, with the former only indicating that it was based on a true story during the end credits and the latter claiming to have been sanctioned by Colonia Dignidad during its opening minutes. Of course, viewers are more likely to appreciate the nuances of both films after familiarizing themselves with the historical context behind them. But even to those without this background knowledge, The Wolf House has proven itself an effective horror film about abuse and trauma, and Bestia’s themes of complicity, guilt, and transitional justice come across clearly to the average viewer. Bear Story’s framing through the circus metaphor is particularly ingenious, especially as it doesn’t reference the military dictatorship at all. On the surface, it may seem like an indictment of animal abuse and captivity — which it may very well be, but there’s more to it.
There’s a degree of specificity to the way the animals in Osorio’s film are snatched from inside their apartment complexes, and how Papa Bear can’t find his family after he returns home. The tin marionette theater he builds to tell his story serves not only as a means of informing the audience, but also as a means for the protagonist to recover from what has happened, as The Wrap’s Steve Pond succinctly summarized in 2015.
In the end, the bear is just making art to heal.
