Venice-Bound Short ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’ Turns An Amusement Park Into A Coming-Of-Age Nightmare (EXCLUSIVE TRAILER)

Italian illustrator and director Virginia Mori transforms a day at an amusement park into something far more sinister in Sasso, carta, forbici (Rock, Paper, Scissors), a new animated short that will world premiere in the Orizzonti competition at the Venice Film Festival. Cartoon Brew has been given exclusive access to the film’s trailer, embedded below.

The nine-minute French-Italian co-production follows a group of young friends through a series of amusement park attractions. Their encounters shift between the ironic and the grotesque, gradually revealing the complexities of their relationships and the characters’ different responses to violence. The games and rides become initiation rituals, marking the end of an idealized childhood and the uncertain beginning of adulthood.

For Mori, an amusement park offered a setting where reassurance and danger could exist side by side.

“I usually work in a surrealistic way, which means that everything I represent doesn’t refer to reality in a realistic way,” she told Cartoon Brew ahead of the film’s Venice premiere. “This kind of approach is more closely related to dream scenarios. From this perspective, the amusement park is the setting I needed to explore an uncanny situation.”

That uncanny quality runs through everything from the Ferris wheel to the haunted house. The park’s cheerful surfaces suggest the sanitized version of childhood presented by adults, one in which violence, hatred, and death are kept out of sight and stories end with good and evil clearly separated. The film’s children, however, are approaching the point when that protected world can no longer hold.

“From Ferris wheels to roller coasters and haunted houses, this multilayered setting is the ideal evocative framework to represent games as rites that mark the passage into adulthood,” Mori explained. “I approach aggressiveness or violence in an undirected and transversal way. For instance, violence can be physical but also psychological, and can often appear in environments normally considered safe.”

Relying heavily on visual metaphor, the film uses falls, leaps, and impossible physical situations to capture the emotional experience of adolescence, when every feeling can seem overwhelming. Mori uses dark humor to keep those experiences open to more than one reading.

“The balance does not lie in each individual action, but is developed throughout the film,” she said. “There are both ironic and serious situations. Of course, the ironic moments cannot diminish the serious ones; it is the combination of both that creates the balance, just as in life itself.”

Although Mori’s characters and finely drawn imagery will be familiar to followers of her illustration work, Rock, Paper, Scissors represents a visual departure from her previous films, which were made in black and white. Here, she uses a soft pastel palette that makes the park look inviting even as the events inside it grow increasingly disturbing.

“I chose soft, pastel colors to create a contrast between the reassuring aesthetics of the setting and the dark atmosphere of the situations,” Mori said. “I tried to create an experience that is joyful and relaxing for the eyes, but more challenging for the mind.”

Music and sound design by Fabio Partisani were developed alongside the animation from the line-test stage onward. The score reinforces both the suspended, dreamlike atmosphere and the mounting dramatic tension, building toward the film’s emotional climax.

Written and directed by Mori, Rock, Paper, Scissors was produced by Withstand Film and Miyu Productions, with Miyu Distribution handling international sales. It will world premiere in the Orizzonti Short Films International Competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, which runs September 2-12.