After a heist that goes wrong, a frail robot who was the driver of a robot mafia ends up being in possession of some loot he shouldn’t have, a human heart

The Bolt Connection is an incredibly stylistic animated short by a group of six French students. Mixing genres and styles from Noir Gangster to Cyberpunk Thriller, the film seems to find the just balance through its ruthlessness and metaphorical. Nicolas Lebas, along with Claire Cartier, Mathilde Dourdy, Thibault Grunenberger, Maurine Lecerf, and Shih-Hui Pan, students of Supinfocom Valenciennes, created a unique world in The Bolt Connection: a graduation year film. After a heist that goes wrong, a frail robot who was the driver of a robot mafia ends up being in possession of some loot he shouldn’t have, a human heart. Tempted by the opportunity of being like his bosses, he grafts the heart to himself and discovers the feeling of being alive. But those brief instants of life have a price.

At first, I had this picture in my head of some evil mafia robots breaking down a door with some 1930s machine guns and red glowing eyes. Something brutal, with almost no light and a lot of darkness to make nice simple compositions. I figured the thing robots lacked were organs, so they could organize some kind of illegal traffic around that. Then the idea of the rust coming from the human limbs came quite quickly. It added the subject of addiction to the movie — and the urge to feel alive. It gave the main character a purpose. Of course, the scenario was a mess and it took a lot of time to simplify, but this work is the most thrilling part of making a movie, in my opinion.

Segment from Vimeo’s Staff Pick Premiere