A Tender Love Triangle Between A Woman, Her Dog, And A Jealous Boyfriend In Sara Priorelli’s ‘My Good Boy’ (EXCLUSIVE TRAILER)

A woman loves her dog. Her boyfriend would rather she loved him that much. That uncomfortable, unglamorous math is the engine of My Good Boy, a gestural animated comedy from Italian filmmaker Sara Priorelli. Cartoon Brew has been given exclusive access to the film’s trailer, seen below.

Priorelli’s line work does a lot of the talking. In a pastel sea, bodies stretch, squash, and swell out of proportion, tipping the film’s domestic scenes between tenderness and grotesquerie. This gentle instability mirrors three characters caught in a triangle none of them will name and is a deliberate expression of the nuances of love.

The refusal to spell things out was the point. “Subtlety and ambiguities are at the core of my film because they allow me to raise questions rather than provide clear answers,” Priorelli told Cartoon Brew. “Tenderness reigns in the air until the man enters the picture. He breaks the balance because, although he is part of their lives, there is something that suggests that he is not entirely welcomed.” Even in “such an intimate and ordinary daily life,” she added, “there are many unspoken words and unresolved issues.”

The film began during the summer before Priorelli’s final year of school, when one of her dogs fell seriously ill and needed constant care from her mother, while another had a litter that filled the house with puppies. “The atmosphere became so lively that I started sketching scenes in my sketchbook,” she said. Those sketches followed her to Budapest, where the loving, almost obsessive bond between a woman and her dog became the seed of her graduation film at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME), along with an interest in “the conflicts and tensions it inevitably creates within the household.”

Priorelli came to animation without knowing how to draw conventionally, studying movement before proportion or perspective, which she said made distortion feel natural rather than stylized. Close-ups exaggerate the characters’ proportions for comic effect, while low-angle shots drop the camera to the dog’s eye level. “Watching videos of dog beauty shows was a great source of inspiration,” she said, “for the composition of the shots, as well as for the way the owners touch and handle their dogs.”

Throughout My Good Boy, sound carries the tension as Priorelli returns to the sound of a balloon being inflated, “as if something were constantly building up and could pop at any moment.” The score, composed by her brother Andrea Priorelli, was built to reflect “the passionate and fluid nature of the relationships within the household.”

My Good Boy is Priorelli’s graduation film from MOME, following her 2021 co-directed short Sweet Dreams, and played Pictoplasma and Clermont-Ferrand and won a top prize at Anibar ahead of its most recent stop at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Judit Czakó co-edited the film with Priorelli.

“What matters most to me is that people have fun watching the film and perhaps relate to one of the characters,” Priorelli said. “Love is always ambiguous, and I don’t think there is ever a single, clear way of interpreting a relationship.”

Keep an eye out for her next project, Volcano, which she is co-directing with Maria Zilli and Adina Oana Enache. The animated short, set during a guided tour in Iceland, turns its attention to tipping, strangers, and the fallout of overtourism.