Kafka for Kids

Pilot episode for a TV series that perversely aims at making Kafka’s tales palpable for toddlers. The story delivered in this first episode is The Metamorphosis. While Gregor Samsa’s transformation into vermin is rendered in animation, the reading of the story occurs in live action in the magical story-house, where an unnamed grandparent figure reads the story to a child, surrounded by a troupe of lively objects, such as Ms. Lamp and Mr. Table. The film ends with an exposition of the complex and troubling ways in which childhood is legally circumscribed in the occupied territories by military law.