Alex Boya’s surreal animated short Bread Will Walk flips the traditional zombie genre – where the dead returning from the grave strike fear and terror – by making the hungry living the threat and the undead needing protection from attack in his latest film, bound for the Cannes Film Festival for a world premiere.

And for Jay Baruchel, who voices all the characters in the National Film Board of Canada film, Boya’s fresh twist on the horror genre allows a wider and vital discussion on what ails the world. “Bread Will Walk is a bedtime story that is also a home for a satire and nightmarish riff on a lot of what’s wrong with civilization in 2025,” Baruchel tells The Hollywood Reporter.

The not-too-subtle short, presented in one continuous shot, centers on a devoted sister, Magret, racing to save her little brother, a loaf of bread-turned zombie, from a starving mob looking to stave off hunger. Baruchel called the bizarre satire on an increasingly chaotic and dehumanizing world “a conversation about the commoditization of food and a bit of a nightmare of capitalism, as food is an essential, elemental thing that every living creature needs.”

Boya wrote, directed and animated Bread Will Walk, an 11-minute film that will screen as part of the Director’s Fortnight program in Cannes. He tells THR that working on the short film at the NFB animation studio, part of Canada’s publicly-funded filmmaker, allowed him the space to experiment with stop motion animation, 3D printing and digital media, and take risks over four years to arrive at a film with a Kafkaesque, stream-of-consciousness look and feel.

“This melting pot of all these kinds of media, like a milkshake of all these ingredients, led to what you see on screen,” Boya sums up. He opted for a traditional 2D animation process with around 4,000 hand drawings using ink on paper to complete the single-shot film.

But that laborious work wasn’t done without first experimenting with artificial intelligence tools to save time in production, Boya adds, as he looked at a full range of digital techniques and tools in the market to complete his film.

In the end, human artists won over AI, hands down on the animation light table. “It was a better product than all of the AI stuff that I’ve been seeing online and since,” Boya reports. Of course, he had the backing of Canada’s Oscar-winning NFB animation studio to keep real people at the center of the artistic process.

“The bottom line is not the first thing. The incentive to replace as many people in the process wasn’t my priority, and the quality of the product was my priority,” Boya explains about the mandate at the NFB. He adds the focus on innovation and pushing the limits of what’s possible aims aims to produce new animation tools and techniques for potential use across the industry and by future generations.

“There’s a lot of trial and error, a lot of inventions that come from these types of risk during development, and these things trickle down into different parties beyond the film,” Boya explains. The animation director adds the inversion of the zombie genre for Bread Will Walk, where two young people are on the run from a comedic, starving mob, aims beyond engaging audiences to leave them pondering the impact of hunger itself in a world increasingly filled by the haves and have-nots.

“Everybody changes when they’re hungry. And the anxieties of the film are not necessarily being the hungry one, but definitely being the one who’s afraid of the hungry,” Boya explains. For Baruchel, the prospect of working from Boya’s directorial vision and voice, and the film’s overarching themes of global doom, is what drew him to the project.

“It’s that rarest of things, all the more rare in 2025, having pretty close to a singular artistic vision from one incredibly talented artist,” he says of his collaboration with Boya as part of his animation team.

“That’s always for me the thing I care about the most when I chat with a director, when I watch a movie, when I listen to a song, when I look at a painting, any of it, what’s most important to me is the voice… His (Boya’s) voice is incredibly distinct and incredibly real,” Baruchel added.