'Sexy Furby': Man of Your Dreams {Fantasia 2021: Short Film Review}

Fantasia International Film Festival - Much like Night of the Living Dicks, Sexy Furby flirts with being an empty spectacle. Many of the aesthetic cues that Sexy Furby falls back on were used to paint a bland picture in the short film (and feature adaptation) of Greener Grass. Where Sexy Furby differs from those projects is it does actually suggest a larger tapestry of thematic depth.

Sexy Furby - Trailer from Magic Society Pictures on Vimeo.

Sexy Furby has a premise that sounds like a practical joke, but it opens up into an examination of romanticism, loss, hyper-capitalism, and legacy. It is about a Woman who attempts to kill herself (Nicole Daddona, who co-wrote and directed the film along with Adam Wilder), who decides not to when she witnesses the eponymous plush, sexy, Furby. She goes on to start a life with this Furby, but not all is well. 

This is a short film that does what short films do best: present a bite-sized shot of symbols and ideas that you could not get anywhere else. It is Sexy Furby’s reliance on these symbols that opens it up to so much interpretation. The Woman is ultimately drawn from suicide by the allure of the perfect body image (the Furby is sexy after all), and kept there by the fact that she can cut it open and pull money out of it. The framing of this never suggests a lack of humanity or care for the Woman, which a worse film might have leaned into. This is much more a grand tragedy of errors, where the affluence that could make someone less suicidal in a hyper-capitalist society simply poisons the soul...

...or does it. The ending of Sexy Furby explodes into even more of a fever dream, that explicitly ties its hyper-capitalist critique to a critique of body image. It is deceptively smart. 

...that and the Furby is SEXY. 

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Author

​Stephen Tronicek is a director/screenwriter focused on psychological horror and comedy. He grew up and is based in St. Louis. Stephen discovered film at a young age and became a professional film critic in his junior year of high school. This eventually led him to write screenplays and make short films. His horror screenplay, "Pieces" was a quarter-finalist in the Launch Million Dollar Screenplay Competition. Focuses include character-driven stories, violence as an extension of the psyche and seeing how much emotionally resonant story material you can get away with if you stick to the theme.