The Village is a 1993 animated short film (14 minutes) directed by Mark Baker.
The story is set in a small village with odd architecture, where all the houses abut each other directly, and form a ring around the central square. The village is filled with mostly unpleasant people. A cleaning woman steals apples from a tree. The priest is a drunk. A miser takes pleasure in his hoard of gold coins. A nosy busybody woman watches everyone else. A Jerkass husband berates his put-upon wife when dinner is not to his liking.
The only sympathetic characters are the put-upon wife, and the gardener, who is planting apple trees outside the village. Not coincidentally, the gardener and the wife are having an affair. It so happens that one afternoon, when the wife and the gardener are having sex in the woods, the jerkass husband kills the miser—throwing him out the window—and steals the gold. The gardener sees the miser come flying out the window, climbs a ladder to investigate, is seen, and is blamed for the crime.
Tropes:
- The Alcoholic: The priest keeps hidden bottles of liquor in the church, swigs wine in the middle of services when no one's looking, and also goes to the graveyard to hide behind tombstones and drink.
- Angry Mob: The villagers chase the gardener with scythes and pitchforks and catch him in the woods.
- Black Comedy: After the miser is buried the ants are seen going underground to munch on his corpse. This also foreshadows the ending where they strip the body of the jerkass husband.
- Book Ends: The opening shot has one ant carrying a chunk of food that is far, far too big for the hole, thus blocking the hole. The closing shot has presumably the same ant carrying the gardener's glasses, and again blocking the hole.
- Chekhov's Gunman: The ants. They strip the corpse of the jerkass husband to nothing but bones, so when the bones are found along with the gardener's glasses, the villagers assume that the gardener has died. The gardener and the wife then make their escape.
- Idiot Ball:
- That one ant, who keeps trying to drag items that are way too big down the ant hole.
- The long-term prisoner sitting in the cell. He has been trying to dig his way out by scooping by hand. The wife passes the gardener a shovel, the gardener quickly digs a tunnel to the outside, the prisoner looks at it—and then instead of following the gardener out, he screams and raises the alarm.
- Jerkass: Most everyone in the village, which is full of unpleasant people. The priest even spits on the man in the village's prison cell. Everyone flings tomatoes and waste water at the gardener in his cell. When the villagers incorrectly conclude that the gardener is dead, they are all sighing with disappointment at missing out on a hanging.
- Limited Animation: The art is deliberately crude and unrealistic.
- Nosy Neighbor: The one mean old lady who spies on everyone. The wife has to feint going back into the village so that she can dash out while the mean old lady's back is turned.
- Produce Pelting: The gardener looks out the window to his cell to see a bunch of tomatoes lying around. The cleaning lady then throws a tomato and nails him right in the face.
- Rooftop Confrontation: The gardener, after escaping from the cell, hides on the roofs. The jerkass husband catches him, leading to a confrontation and fight on the roof which ends with the husband falling to his death.
- Silence Is Golden: The only dialogue of any importance is when the Nosy Neighbor sees the gardener on the ladder and starts screaming gibberish that's interrupted by the recognizable words "thief", "murder", and "window." There's also the hymn sung by the parishioners in church.
- Speaking Simlish: Most of the "dialogue" is shouts, grunts, or jabbering nonsense.
- Spiteful Spit: The priest is a most un-Christian fellow who spits on the prisoner in the cell.
- Stripped to the Bone: Those ants sure are both efficient and hungry, as they strip the corpse of the jerkass husband to the bone over a single night. When the villagers find the gardener's glasses next to the bones (the jerkass husband had pulled the gardener's glasses off), they conclude that the gardener is dead.
- Sympathetic Adulterer: The wife, who flees from her jerkass husband and his Jabba Table Manners and goes to the forest to have sex with the gardener.
