Ninety-Five Senses is an animated short film (13 minutes) directed by Jared Hess and Jeshua Hess.
A bespectacled older man and self-described "hillbilly" named Coy (voiced by Tim Blake Nelson) reminisces about his past, and specifically, how he used his five senses to experience the world. He talks about when he was a boy and did stuff like go to the video store and do the puzzles in Highlights magazine. Eventually, however, Coy reveals where he is now: on death row, about to be executed for killing a family of five when he set fire to an auto body shop when he was 19 years old.
Tropes:
- Art Shift: Each anecdote (and the Framing Device) is animated in a different style.
- Black Comedy: Coy's commentary about his last meal, and how the prison cooks take real care with such meals, is accompanied by animation of him ordering his last meal as if he's a customer in a swanky French restaurant.
- Chekhov's Gun: Coy's comment about how his father went deaf from the noise of the sawmill, and thus would play music very loud at home, which also made Coy go deaf. That's why he couldn't hear Cricket's family, living above the autoshop.
- Death Row: Where Coy is and where he very soon will not be, since he's due to be executed in 40 minutes. He relates this to his senses as well, talking about how there's no "texture" in his life because everything is steel and concrete, how all touch is hostile and how the feel of a simple pat on the hand by his defense attorney rocked his world.
- Face Death with Dignity: A man on death row, due to be executed in less than an hour, reminiscing about his life.
- Foreshadowing: A shot of the moon passing across the sky morphs into a shot of a cell window with bars. It's not until a few minutes later that Coy reveals he's a prisoner on Death Row.
- Imagine Spot: A terribly sad moment is triggered by Coy's defense attorney putting her hand on his and giving him a reassuring pat. Instantly he's whisked into a fantasy where he didn't set fire to the body shop, Cricket and his family were still alive, Coy got his life together, married the defense attorney, became a lawyer himself, and helped other death row inmates.
- Minimalist Cast: Only one part, Tim Blake Nelson as the voice of Coy, talking about his life and how it went wrong.
- Mood Whiplash: The mostly whimsical mood of an old man reminiscing about his youth turns on a dime when Coy says that after he got fired from Cricket's auto shop, he set it on fire. The auto shop that Cricket lived above, "...with his family."
- Prisoner's Last Meal: The cartoon eventually reveals that Coy is looking at his, one that runs the gamut from lobster to a "McDonald's-style" filet-o-fish. He ruefully notes that he committed the cardinal last meal error: ordering a feast days in advance, then finding on the day of that he didn't have an appetite.
- Title Drop: Coy's talking about his five senses, and his imminent execution, leads to him talking about how the senses fail at death (hearing goes last). Then he talks about reading once about speculation that humans actually have a hundred senses but only lose five. He wonders if maybe, at death, if he'll get access to the other 95 senses, or if that is the afterlife.
- Written Sound Effect: The sound of Coy's father feeding planks of wood into a saw at the sawmill is accompanied by the actual sound, but also speech bubbles that say "NYEEEEER!".
