An Unhinged Support Group Anchors Áron Siegler’s Absurd RCA Short ‘Anti Wizards’

Floating rocks, classic cartoon logic, and an unhinged therapy group of spellcasters set the tone for Anti Wizards, a student film that leans hard into absurdity. But beneath the chaos, director Áron Siegler is working through something more grounded by addressing universal themes such as exclusion, anxiety, and the strange emotional landscape of contemporary life.

The project, developed during his time at the Royal College of Art, marks a turning point in his approach to animation. It is also where he found a visual and tonal language that could not exist anywhere else.

An “Absurd Humor Theme Park”

Most stories are built on a strong narrative idea or a compelling main character. Anti Wizards, on the other hand, began life as a place.

“The main idea was the island itself,” Siegler explains. “I was trying to change my perspectives about animation and wanted to make something completely new, so I was experimenting on a cartoonish comedy.”

That experimentation quickly took on a life of its own. “Very soon, the idea of an island with floating rocks started to draw itself,” he says. “It became a kind of ‘Absurd Humor Theme Park’ where anything can happen.”

As the visual world expanded, so did its internal logic. Siegler began to define rules, histories, and a strange, magical system that holds up the film’s absurdist narrative. “As the brainstorming was going on, the lore of the island, the rules of magic, and what this whole thing was representing in our postmodern, ever-progressing world became evident,” he says. “The story just started to write itself.”

That sense of organic development is visible on screen. The film moves with the loose unpredictability of a sketchbook brought to life, yet it carries a cohesive tone that keeps the absurdity from spinning out of control.

A Native Language

Siegler points to his time at the Royal College of Art as a crucial formative period in developing his artistic tastes. Before arriving there, he felt caught between mediums, trying to justify all that drawing.

“My main criticism with myself before RCA was that my films were stuck between live-action and animation,” he says. “They were fully drawn and often surreal, but I had a sense they would work as much as a live-action film as an animated short.”

Anti Wizards was the remedy to that tension. “I think I finally managed to find a universe that is animation to its core,” he says. “With its cartoonish environments, 2D and 3D mashup, mixed media, and unrealistic physicality, it wouldn’t work at all in any other medium.”

That commitment to animation as a form, not just a tool, drives the film’s eclectic aesthetic. Characters stretch, environments shift, and visual logic bends in ways that reinforce the story’s themes of instability and exclusion. The medium of animation becomes part of the film’s larger message.

Composing in Color

Siegler also handled the film’s music, bringing another layer of cohesion to the project. For him, sound and image are inseparable.

“Writing songs on its own and writing a soundtrack to a film are two completely different workflows,” he says. Outside of film, his music project, The Pixel Rain, leans toward darker, industrial textures. For Anti Wizards, the goal was something very different.

“I was looking for something fun, happy, and a bit over the top,” he explains. “Something that makes you assume this is just pure sarcasm.”

He describes his process in almost synesthetic terms. “When it comes down to a film score, I’m trying to find sounds, chords, melodies, and instruments with the same colors as the visuals,” he says. “I have some sort of synesthesia, I guess, so that definitely makes it easier.”

The result is a soundtrack that amplifies the film’s tonal and narrative contradictions. Bright, playful sounds accompany moments that hint at something more uneasy beneath the surface.

Laughing Through the Noise

At the center of Anti Wizards is a therapy group that blends humor with darker emotional currents. Siegler sees that balance as essential rather than incidental. It’s also deeply personal.

“Humor is basically a healing process for me,” he says. “Especially in today’s society, where you can easily feel smothered in social media junk, political news, the growing danger of AI, and anxiety that the world is about to reach a point of no return.”

That sense of overwhelm informs the film’s energy. The jokes come fast, but they carry an undercurrent of frustration rather than just whimsy.

“We’re constantly drowning in all of this,” he says. “A free, sarcastic laugh can feel like I got out of water and managed to breathe for a second before going under again.”

Siegler is clear about what he hopes the film can offer. “If I managed to make only one person feel the same way during this movie, then I guess it wasn’t a waste of time.”

He is also drawn to comedy that confronts rather than avoids discomfort. “I find comedy one of the best ways to express frustration about our world,” he says. “I prefer humor which isn’t scared of darker themes but actively faces them, even if it’s provocative and divisive.”

In Anti Wizards, Siegler’s philosophy takes shape as a chaotic, colorful world where laughter and unease coexist as opposite sides of the same coin. It is a place where absurdity becomes a coping mechanism, and where animation, in its purest form, proves uniquely equipped to capture the contradictions of modern life.