In a dying American shopping mall haunted by ghosts of commerce and culture, three teens navigate absurd adventures while surreal guest interviews with artists, thinkers, and weirdos punctuate their journey through the ruins of late capitalism.
Très Mall combines the DIY ethos of underground comics with the visual playfulness of early MTV animation. It’s Liquid Television meets The Midnight Gospel by way of Ghost World. Both a love letter to lost youth and a critique of what replaced it, Très Mall is a weird, smart, and urgent animated series for our exhausted era.
In Très Mall, Larson stages a philosophically-driven satire within the purgatory of an infinite shopping mall, where late-capitalist consumption becomes both setting and subject. The series brings together a rotating cast of thinkers including Noam Chomsky, David Joselit, Priyamvada Gopal, McKenzie Wark, and Boris Groys, translating dense theoretical positions into an absurd, painterly animated world. Larson treats animation not as illustration, but as a philosophical medium capable of rendering ideology visible, experiential, and strange.
Presented alongside Made in Mexico: The Anti-Communist Cartoons of Dibujos Animados S.A. (1952–56), the work extends into archival research. These films, produced under the United States Information Agency, deployed modernist animation to circulate American political interests across Latin America. In collaboration with Byron Davies and Carlos Oliva Mendoza, Larson reconstructs this largely overlooked history through screenings and critical texts, tracing animation’s dual function as aesthetic experiment and instrument of persuasion.
Together, these projects position animation as a site where ideology is not simply represented but operationalized, linking Cold War propaganda to the diffuse spectacle of contemporary consumer culture.
New York, NY
Très Mall Full Series on DIS
