Protocole Sandwich: a likeable and subversive commentary on conformism, hysteria and denial in Western society

Valerie Bousquie, Josephine Meis, Antoine Vignon, Benjamin Warnitz, “Protocole Sandwich” (2019)

This very likeable and comic-strip-styled animation comes across as a satirical commentary on conformism, mass hysteria and mass denial in Western society. A group of rangers called the Sandwich Protocol are sent to monitor suspicious activity around an antenna tower installation of some sort in a remote desert. The rangers use handheld guns that look like portable electric fans to dispel apparent glitches in their world of reality. They use these guns on an elderly woman and her pet raven: the woman survives (so she’s real enough) but the raven fails the test and is packed away in a special box to be taken back to HQ. During a lunch-break, one of the rangers decides to check something at the antenna itself and discovers something that looks like a sabotage attempt. He is accosted by a strange man who is trying to tell him something and to demonstrate it as well …

Although at the time I saw it, the film had no English-language subtitles, the visual narrative suggests that the rangers themselves are employed to maintain an artificial semblance of reality and the elderly woman and the strange man represent threats to that particular Matrix. The strange man in particular is trying to convince the ranger that he and his fellow rangers have been deceived to believe that they live in the real world when in fact they don’t and the real world actually exists outside the artificial world their masters have created. This means that the raven dies because it is a real creature and not a product of the artificial world of the film. The rangers treat the woman and the stranger as though they are infected by a mysterious and deadly disease, and their desert world as potentially dangerous.

While the stranger ends up being subdued by the rangers in a black box and they leave the box in the charge of the ranger who first encountered the fellow, that ranger seems to have absorbed enough of the stranger’s ranting message that he appears ready to open the box and release the disruptive chaos that will destroy the artificial desert world and reveal the real world. At this point the film ends leaving the audience to speculate what the ranger might do: will he obey and conform just as he has always done or will his curiosity overcome habit?

The animation resembles a Tintin comic strip and the gadgets that the rangers in their special hermetic suits use to combat the dangers of the real world intruding into their careful virtual digital world are very comic. These weapons, the protective clothing the rangers wear and the triangular symbols on their uniforms are hilariously subversive comments on the extreme collective hysteria present in Western society that seeks to stamp out heterodox opinion and information and enforce a cult-like outlook and ideology. Even the food the rangers eat – sandwich triangles – shows the intrusive extent of their brainwashing. The colours are bright and call attention to the unreality of the world that the rangers believe is real. The glitches, representing tears in the virtual world (and suggesting how unstable it is), are beautifully done; in a climactic scene, they turn the animation into a gorgeously psychedelic riot of colour and imagery. As is usual in Gobelins shorts, the voice acting is superb and makes the action seem more real than it actually is.

While the plot will not bear a treatment longer than its six to seven minutes, it already packs considerable information about the kind of dysfunctional society that exists in its world and how freedom and reality are physically so close to humans and yet still so far away.