There is something so deeply disturbing about Chris Landreth’s new ‘psycho-realism’ short – The Spine – that two weeks after screening the 11-minute animated film, it’s still perturbing on a number of levels.

On the surface, The Spine is about an unassuming little man whose obscenely overweight wife has nagged him spineless, literally.

‘It’s not the easiest film to watch, at least not for me,’ the Oscar-winning director (Ryan) and former engineer confided to a room full of computer animation enthusiasts during a working lunch in Toronto hosted by the Computer Animation Studios of Ontario.

‘Dan is a full body without a spine,’ he notes, joking that Dan’s voice, Gordon Pinsent, also ‘has problems with his spine.’

For Dan (56) and Mary (54), surreal group therapy sessions (inspired by Landreth’s own experience 13 years ago at the end of a failed relationship) won’t save their 26 years of mind-numbing marriage, nor alter their codependency, originally triggered by the side effects of fertility drugs.

Landreth describes Mary as a ‘harsh character who is not that likeable.’ Nonetheless, ‘there’s a lot of humanity to this woman,’ he says, explaining that Mary ‘couldn’t have kids,’ so she turns Dan into something she can ‘cradle and scold.’

Yet Mary and Dan cannot be dismissed as merely cartoon characters from a dead marriage.

When people ‘become more interested in their bodies,’ they ultimately ‘become more curious about the world… and develop spine,’ observes Landreth, who dubs his surrealist animation style as ‘psycho-realism.’

It’s about ‘how animation can be used to depict the realism of a character’s emotional and spiritual state,’ says Landreth, noting that he then must ‘add a surreal layer’ to create something ‘simultaneously funny and dead serious.’

The Spine is 10 times more psycho-complicated than the mind-bending Ryan – which in itself was no walk in the park, as it tackled the personal and deadly demons of addiction and alcoholism. But it has all of Landreth’s CGI signature moves, with ‘partial’ characters coming apart at the seams as their lives disintegrate around them.

Landreth says his preoccupation with ‘complex and messy human emotions’ was influenced by Dada (a post-World War One cultural movement which, among other things, protested against oppressive intellectual rigidity), and more specifically by figurative painter ‘Francis Bacon during the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s.’

The Spine was ‘two years in the making,’ says Landreth, and it’s ‘basically the same production team I worked with on Ryan,’ which includes ‘co-operation between the government, private and education’ sectors, and specifically between the National Film Board, Copperheart Entertainment, C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures and Seneca College.

Its world preem is at the prestigious animation festival in Annecy, France (June 8-13), and its Canadian preem is at the Worldwide Short Film Festival in Toronto (June 16-21), presented by the Canadian Film Centre.