A four-minute-forty-five stroll to feed the park ducks that a children’s-film festival and a genre-comedy crowd both gave prizes to — which says plenty about the film without saying what happens in it.

DUCKS is a solo CG short by the Norwich animator AJ Jefferies (several write-ups, Colossal included, render it “Jeffries” — the credits spell it with the second e). It premiered at Pictoplasma Berlin on 1 May 2025 and runs four minutes and forty-five seconds, not the “four and a half” the find had it at. The premise holds exactly as billed: bread, a pond, and a reveal Jefferies builds the whole short around. The reaction critics keep describing — a gasp, then a laugh — checks out, which is exactly why this review won’t describe what triggers it.

The award count in the find is right, but the attributions are worth pinning down — one summary had the Sweaty Eyeballs prize wrongly credited to Interfilm Berlin. Checked against the film’s own tally: Audience Choice is Sweaty Eyeballs’ own prize, and Best Short Film for Children is KUKI Festival Berlin’s own citation. Add a Youth Jury Prize at Viborg, a People’s Choice at Big Teeth Small Shorts, an Audience Award at Cinemagic On the Pulse, a Colour Box Audience Award at Flatpack, an Honourable Mention at LIAF, and a rare double win at BREF — the Bear With Me and Creepshorts awards both — and the nine-prize figure holds exactly.

What the find had nothing on is the how. Jefferies wrote, designed, directed and animated the whole thing alone in 3ds Max and V-Ray — the tools he also uses for client work at the two-person studio MDI Digital — farming out only score and sound design to Megalithic Sound. No studio backing, no grant: self-initiated and self-funded, like his other personal shorts (POOB, PEAS, H O R S E), with Ko-fi tips arriving after the fact rather than financing it up front. It’s free to watch in full on his own YouTube channel and on Vimeo, though it didn’t go up there until April 2026 — nearly a year into the festival run.

The KUKI win is the detail worth sitting with. A children’s-film festival gave its top short prize to something that spends its second half on real body horror — stretching limbs, forms that fuse into something with too many heads, a punchline that lands like a nature-documentary warning label with the dial turned to uncanny. Nothing on screen is graphic and nobody is shown getting hurt, but it earns the “dark comedy” tag harder than two sentences can convey — worth knowing before clicking play expecting a nature clip.