We’re back with another installment of SAW IT FIRST AT ANOMALY, our series revisiting films we first discovered at Rochester’s Anomaly Film Festival before they found a bigger audience!

This time, Mike and Kenya (@reviewsmayvary) are pulling double duty with Robot Dreams and Flow, two gorgeous, nearly wordless animated films that went from festival discoveries to Oscar recognition.

We’re talking unlikely friendships, found families, loneliness, heartbreak, and why a cartoon dog and robot can absolutely destroy you emotionally without saying a single word. Plus, we dig into the surprisingly big questions these little films ask about love, loss, belonging, and knowing when to let go.

And, of course, we’ve got a few books that explore those same themes in some wonderfully strange ways.

Books mentioned in this episode:

• The Wild Robot — Peter Brown
• Monstrilio — Gerardo Sámano Córdova
• A Psalm for the Wild-Built — Becky Chambers

Come for the adorable animals and robots, stay for the existential dread and unexpected emotional devastation!

We’re heading back into the woods for another installment of SAW IT FIRST AT ANOMALY, our series revisiting films we first discovered at Rochester’s Anomaly Film Festival before they found a bigger audience!

This time, Mike and Kenya (@reviewsmayvary) are digging into Hellbender, a witchy, metal-fueled folk-horror nightmare about mothers, daughters, family secrets, and what happens when protecting your kid starts looking a whole lot like keeping them prisoner.

We’re talking creepy woodland vibes, killer music, generational trauma, and some seriously questionable parenting choices. Plus, we’ve got a handful of books that pair perfectly with this strange little gem.

Books mentioned in this episode:

● Salt Bones — Jennifer Givhan

● Dark Sisters — Kristi DeMeester

● Lobizona — Romina Garber

● Little Eve — Catriona Ward

Come for the witches, stay for the family dysfunction and heavy metal!

We dig into Huesera: the Bone Woman right off the bat — a Mexican body‑horror that turns pregnancy into a haunted, creaky meditation on identity, autonomy, and the way our bodies get policed by family, culture, and, uh, the internet. We nerd out on the film’s brilliant use of sound design — those bone‑crackling cues that do half the storytelling — and map how its Bruja/folkloric elements (and whisperings of La Llorona) fold into bigger conversations about maternal ambivalence, post‑partum isolation, and who gets to own a body. We thread this into larger literary pairings — V. Castro’s The Haunting of Alejandra and Queen of the Cicadas, Gerardo Simiano Cordova’s Monstrilio, and Andrew Joseph White’s You Weren’t Meant to Be Human — to show how the monstrous woman trope can be both a site of rage against colonial/racist structures and a space for reclaiming agency rather than simple evil.

Along the way we riff on queer angles, trans embodiment, and Frankensteinian hubris, connecting parasitism and consumption metaphors to the lived politics of reproduction and the isolating spectacle of “mommy culture” on social media. We also shout out Anomaly Film Fest and the way festivals can incubate buzzy, underseen films that go on to bigger platforms — which is exactly how we found this gem. Basically: spooky season meets rigorous, messy empathy, and yes, we make jokes about babies being parasites — because sometimes you gotta laugh to stop crying while unpacking the ethics of embodiment.