Yes-People (Já-fólkið) is a 2020 animated short film from Iceland directed by Gísli Darri Halldórsson.
It is based around three households living in the same apartment building. One consists of an elderly married couple; she irritates him with the way she loudly slurps soup. A second consists of a single mom music teacher and her teenaged son, who is a gamer. The third is a middle-aged married couple, with a husband who works in an office and his wife, a homemaker, who has developed a major drinking problem.
The hook to the cartoon is that the only word spoken is "yes" (Icelandic já, pronounced "yow"), but with many different shades of meaning.
Tropes:
- All-CGI Cartoon: Done in the standard 3-D CGI style.
- Berserk Button: The older woman irritates her husband by loudly slurping her soup in the morning. She is obviously aware of this and does it on purpose even as he turns up the volume on the radio.
- Dreadful Musician: The single mom is a music teacher, and in one scene she is cringing as a boy plays a recorder very, very badly.
- Lady Drunk: The homemaker chugs alcohol in the daytime while her husband's at work. She hides it behind a chair when he comes home. Later, when she passes out at the dinner table only to slip and fall out of the chair, she seems to have a moment of clarity.
- Recurring Riff: "Sveitin milli sanda", a 1960s Icelandic hit by Elly Vilhjálms. It appears repeatedly throughout the short, like when the older man turns up the radio to drown out his wife's soup slurping, or when a boy in music class plays it horribly on the recorder, or again during the closing credits.
- Right Through the Wall: It turns out that 1) the older couple have a surprisingly vigorous sex life for their age, and 2) the apartment building has thin walls. Both the middle-aged couple and the mom & son are made uncomfortable by the older wife's moaning and screaming.
- Scatting: "Sveitin milli sanda", the song by Elly Vilhjálms, which is featured repeatedly during the short, is nothing but Vilhjálms singing "ah ah ah ah ah" a lot.
- Silence Is Golden: The only word spoken during the cartoon is "ja" in its various intonations...until the end, where the husband moans "no no no", as he sees the snow outside and realizes he'll have to go shoveling again.
- Slice of Life: Essentially a day in the life of three households, stuck in their various routines.
- Title Drop: The word "yes" is said a lot, in many different ways.
- Toilet Humor: The husband gains revenge for his wife's soup-slurping a little later, when he breaks wind loudly in the living room.
