Musophobia is a 45-second long animated surreal Horror film created by a team of 1st year animators and CG Artists (Sophie Refshauge, Fah Anuntasomboon, Mie Pedersen, Talia Bordallo Micó, Simon Halbergg, and Frederik Troels-Smith) from The Animation Workshop as part of a group project and it was published on May 30, 2012. The short is about a particularly musophobic elephant having a vivid nightmare featuring the rodents that they fear.
The film can be watched on YouTube
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The film contains examples of:
- Catapult Nightmare: The elephant wakes up from their rodent-related nightmare in panic, clattering their teeth and finding that they have fallen out of bed and landed in some of the mousetraps they set up around the bed.
- Deliberately Monochrome: The Nightmare Sequence is done in black and white, barring the glowing yellow eyes of the rodents and the flashes of intense cyans and magentas throughout the scene.
- Elephants Are Scared of Mice: The main character is an anthropomorphic elephant who's deadly afraid of small rodents, as indicted by the fact they have loads of mousetraps surrounding their bed and they end up having an surreal nightmare relating to those rodents which ends up horrifying them, such as when a mouse-like being vomits dozens of rodents onto them and all they can do is cower in fear.
- Funny Animal:
- The main character is an anthropomorphic elephant who wears clothes, is bipedal, sleeps in a bed, has set up dozens of mouse traps around said bed, and displays very human expressions. If the character was a human, the short would largely stay the same, albeit losing out on the reference to the Elephants Are Scared of Mice belief.
- A more humanoid, cartoon mouse character in a suit and hat appears throughout the elephant's nightmare and they end up vomiting dozens of rodents onto the latter.
- Nightmare Sequence: The entire film is about an anthropomorphic elephant going through an unpleasant nightmare based around their musophobia (fear of rodents). In the nightmare, they're constantly surrounded by rodents and they running away from them in the woods, but they're still watched by said rodents and throughout the nightmare, there's flashes of intense colors and images to hammer in the horror. The elephant then encounters an ominous-looking mouse with a top hat that vomits dozens of rodents onto them, leaving them completely helpless.
- No Name Given: The main character's name is not mentioned at all in the film.
- Silence Is Golden: There is not a single line of dialogue in the film as it instead uses the main character's expressions to express the terror they're going through during the nightmare they're having.
- Yellow Eyes of Sneakiness: A majority of the rodents in the dream have bright glowing yellow eyes, making them more menacing towards the musophobic elephant. During the scene where the elephant runs through the woods, there are dozens of yellow eyes in the background, indicting that the rodents are watching them run.
