Bread Will Walk has been selected for this year’s Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes!

Link to the press release

A National Film Board of Canada production

A devoted sister races to save her brother, a bread-turned zombie. A mob of hungry living pursues, mouths agape. Streets twist into mazes, reason crumbles. Can love defy appetite?

The planet is starving, but a corporation called The Mill has the solution: miracle bread. Except it turns people who eat it into fresh loaves of walking bread. A devoted sister tries to save her little bread-brother, who’s being pursued by a hungry mob through twisted streets. Hunger reigns, reason crumbles. In a world that wants to eat you alive, can love defy appetite?

The animated short Bread Will Walk is a relentless fever dream of fear and loafing. With darkly delicious humour, this surreal chase unfolds in a constant morph of hand-drawn chaos—raw, like a napkin sketch, mirroring a world unravelling under the weight of society’s paranoia.

Masterfully baked by Alex Boya (Turbine), with all characters twitchily voiced by Jay Baruchel, this frenetic fresco of satire skewers the hypocrisies of corporate propaganda and its incessant kneading of a stale society into devouring whatever it’s fed—literally.

To create Bread Will Walk, Alex Boya spent four years meticulously “kneading” the film’s animation and storytelling. Starting with more than 4,000 hand-drawn ink-on-paper frames, he explored stop-motion with real bread and digital techniques like Unity and VR but returned to a 2D process. Each drawing was scanned, segmented and enhanced with photo-collage textures. AI-assisted tools were tested but ultimately abandoned to preserve the film’s dream-like, hand-made essence. In the final pass, Photoshop layering and a “pastry glaze” filter in After Effects unified the visuals. Boya’s continuous-shot vision captures a breathless, surreal fresco where love challenges collective madness.

→ Read Bread Will Walk: The “Baking-Of” to get a taste of the unique recipe.

NUTRITION FACTS

Per viewing (% of Daily Dose)

Carbohydrate: 16%

Humour: 39%

Adrenaline: 37%

Weirdness: 59%

Sodium: 3%

INGREDIENTS: Engineered flour, Kafkaesque despair, Irony, Hand-drawings, Technological experimentation, Dystopian present, Monty Python wackiness, High-fructose Jay Baruchel syrup, Yeast, Love, Hansel & Gretel references, Boya’s secret spices.

CONTAINS: Gluten.

MAY CONTAIN: Zombies.

Made in Canada.

STORY & THEMES

Why did you want to tell this story? What was the starting point?

Bread Will Walk was born of a reflection on overconsumption and dehumanization. By subverting the symbolism of bread, I imagined a parable in which a basic food becomes propaganda, and where love tries to defy appetite.

Like Turbine, Bread Will Walk explores the intersection of technology and humanity, both the promising and the perilous. Here, you subtly address weighty topics like genetically modified food and food scarcity. Do you think society is heading in that direction, or are we already there?

We’re not approaching it. We’ve arrived. Hunger is now algorithmic. Abundance has become theatre. Modified foodstuffs are among us and they blink. Making bread the protagonist reflects that shift, from nutrition to spectacle. I didn’t want to preach, just stage the edible uncanny.

There are strong references to propaganda and its historical context throughout the film. Did you dive deep into research for this? Were there particular periods of propaganda that fascinated you? And really—do you think propaganda is even a separate thing anymore? Isn’t it the dominant voice in media, movies and advertising?

I soaked up leaflets, jingles and early cartoons. It fascinated me, a time when sweetness masked coercion. Today, we binge influence while smiling. Algorithms have replaced ministries. Propaganda no longer feels external. It’s ambient. We quote it without noticing. Bread, once again, became the symbol: promised, “oozified,” “yeastified.”

What would you like the audience to take away from the film?

That our survival instincts can devour what’s left of our humanity. Bread Will Walk asks a simple, brutal question: In a starving world, how far can love go? And who eats whom?

ABOUT THE PROCESS

There’s a remarkable, almost single-shot feeling throughout the film, with a continuous metamorphosis that’s somewhat reminiscent of Bruce Bickford’s clay animation. What led you to that stylistic choice, and more importantly, how did you pull it off?

I wanted animation to behave like fever: unstoppable, morphing, disobedient. So I avoided cuts. Everything mutates forward. I made four thousand drawings, scanned crumbs, inked skins, added digital overlays. But what holds it together is the movement logic, a grotesque ballet that never pauses. Time collapses, like memory, like fermentation.

How does this work fit into your cinematic journey?

This film continues my exploration of surreal narratives that question the contemporary world. After Turbine, I keep crossing the boundaries between reality and imagination, now with touches of social satire and apocalyptic tenderness.

What challenges did you face during the making of this film? How did you overcome them?

The main challenge was to make the brother’s transformation into a half-man, half-bread creature believable, without losing the emotional core. Through visual experimentation and close team synergy, we sculpted a figure that is strange, moving and universal.

You’ve built an entire universe beyond the film: GIFs, social media groups and more, all centred around bread. Why bread, and what inspired you to create such an elaborate world? Do you see yourself continuing to explore this universe?

Bread is ordinary yet radiant. It appears everywhere. It crumbles, nourishes, divides and unites. That contradiction became fertile ground. I kept feeding it through GIFs, indexes and community absurdities. Soon the world inflated around it like dough. I’m not done. It’s still rising, possibly forever.

ABOUT THE VOICES OF THE CHARACTERS

Jay Baruchel voices all the characters. Did you consider other actors, or was he always your first choice? What made you feel he was the right fit for these Bread characters?

Jay was the one for this—elastic, raw, brilliant. His voice could blister, sigh, plead and mock, sometimes in one breath. That’s what the characters needed: ambiguity. His improvisation added spice. It felt like casting multiple people inside one esophagus.

ABOUT THE MUSIC

Bread Will Walk is a visual tour de force, but its power is truly elevated by the music. It begins with the calm, minimalist notes by Martin Floyd Caesar and culminates in a hushed rendition of “All of Me.” Did you have a clear vision for the music and sound from the start, or did you rely on the composer’s input to shape it?

Sound needed to haunt rather than decorate. Martin translated silence into pulse. I gave him emotional anchors and he built atmospheres. The final song is disintegrated jazz—memory eroding while smiling. His score doesn’t accompany. It infects. We treated music like another voice, whispering before collapse.

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