Watch Niki Lindroth von Bahr’s ‘The Burden’ on Vimeo On-Demand

Good news everyone! Niki Lindroth von Bahr’s excellent 2017 stop-motion animated short, The Burden (Min börda), is now available to watch online via Vimeo On-Demand.

A dark animated musical with apocalyptic undertones, The multi-award winning The Burden debuted at the 2017 Annecy Festival, where it won the Cristal for Best Short Film, and went on to pick up awards at Clermont-Ferrand, Fredrikstad, TIFF, the European Animation Awards, and the Fantoche Festival, among many others.

It also won three awards at the second annual GLAS Animation Festival earlier this spring: the Grand Prix, the Audience Award, and the inaugural FXX Elevation Award, which included a $25,000 grant to develop an original animated project with the network. And if that’s not enough, Lindroth von Bahr was also included in Variety’s 2018 list of 10 Animators to Watch, alongside filmmakers such as Trisha Gum, co-director of The LEGO Movie Sequel, and Pixar director Domee Shi.

The Burden is s divided into four episodes that take place in a supermarket, a long term hotel, a call center, and a hamburger restaurant set in a modern, generic marketplace next to a large freeway. The employees of these various commercial venues deal with boredom and existential anxiety by performing cheerful musical turns. As the film’s tagline notes, “The apocalypse is a tempting liberator.”

While we contemplate the myriad reasons why The Burden went largely ignored in the 2017 Oscar race, get ready to pony up $5.99 to Vimeo for the privilege of watching Lindroth von Bahr’s musical short over and over again. Sure, you can rent it for $3.99, but then you won’t be able to show it to all your friends on your phone from the backseat of an Uber ride, and that would truly be a shame.

Watch the trailer in the player below, and then head over to the New Europe Film Sales Vimeo channel to rent or buy the full version:

Jennifer Wolfe is Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.