‘A Pint of Bitter’ by Conor Kehelly (2026) Review: Animafest Zagreb
Irish animator, illustrator, and music producer Conor Kehelly brings ‘A Pint of Bitter’ (2026) to the 2026 Animafest Zagreb. It’s a self-funded solo project where the aspect ratio is a circle, and the fisheye lens signals the titular pint. Watching the uncanny production unfold feels a bit like gazing through the bottom of an empty glass after a big night.
We begin in a bar, where a man tries to enjoy a quiet pint. A father and his 18-year-old son pick a fight with the punter, and no one at the table seems to know what they’re fighting about. The fairly pedestrian plot then makes a hard pivot into absurdism. The father swallows his son, and his head explodes. The punter and audience are left trying to make sense of what just happened.
The moment of inhalation and explosion is a site of cosmic release. The journey from microcosm to macrocosm kicks off at warp speed as we descend into the empty skull and are then propelled into outer space, the intestinal tract, and end up in a taxi. The odyssey is demarcated by airborne pints and light bleeds. The grain, glow, and high contrast color look like expired celluloid, but the film was born in a digital universe.
Kehelly was trained in 2D animation, but ventures into the third dimension in his latest short, while retaining the graphic sensibility of a comic book artist. Flat, hand-drawn figures in a 3D world amplify the elastic sense of time and space.
It’s Nice That describes Kehelly’s work as sometimes starting from a silly place, then working its way to a serious feeling. His first film, ‘The Final Nail in the Coffin’ (2023), was an equally absurdist portrait of a community in crisis. The connective tissue between this aesthetic and the society that gave rise to it is its gesture towards the notion that we live in a chaotic and weird world. Temperatures are rising, bombs are falling, and intelligence is increasingly artificial. Freaking out is a reasonable reaction to compounding and concurrent crises.
Realism can be asphyxiating when the world appears as if it could be no other way. Kehelly heralds a fantastical, a-logical, and sensuous order that absolves itself from the pressure to make sense. Or present something palatable. It’s what Sergei Eisenstein would describe as “freedom from the shackles of logic, from shackles in general.”
Determined not to let his graduation project be his last film, the Manchester School of Art alumnus made ‘The Final Nail in the Coffin’ and ‘A Pint of Bitter’ in between commercial projects. Operating outside of a traditional funding ecosystem comes with constraints, but it also enables creative independence.
Kehelly directed, animated, voice-acted, scored, and re-wrote the score four times for ‘A Pint of Bitter’. Before swerving into the big bad world of animation, he was classically trained as a double-bass player. The film’s bassline has more of a galactic feel. It’s ambient, moody, and heightens the sci-fi dimensions of the 9-minute short.
The circular ratio is a nod to the film beginning at the bottom of a glass, but by its conclusion, it could be read as a portal or telescope. Kehelly’s lawless world order resists explanation. It embraces disorientation, therein suggesting that the absurd is not an escape from reality, but a faithful rendering of it.
‘A Pint of Bitter’ by Conor Kehelly screens at the 2026 Animafest Zagreb festival (in competition).
contributed by: Amanda Barbour
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