Crybaby

Crybaby is a deeply personal animated short by Welsh filmmaker Eleri Edwards, created through Ffilm Cymru’s Beacons scheme and produced by Biggerhouse Film, a company dedicated to amplifying marginalised voices. Drawing on her own experiences of late-diagnosed autism, Edwards crafts an intimate portrait of self-discovery, memory, and the struggle against internalised negativity. The film follows Carys, a 24-year-old woman packing boxes as she prepares to leave her parents’ house. What begins as a simple act of moving soon dissolves into an otherworldly landscape where she is overwhelmed by endless boxes and the haunting weight of her past. Lurking in the shadows is Carys’s internal voice, brought to life as an angry, chaotic scrawl of pencil scribbles—an embodiment of self-doubt and internalised stigma. As she sorts through the fragments of her childhood, memories of early school days and teenage sleepovers resurface, revealing the pain of exclusion and misunderstanding that shaped her. The 2D animation shifts fluidly between reality and imagination, capturing the turbulence of Carys’s inner world. Crybaby is both a personal reckoning and a universal story—an exploration of autism, mental health, and the fight to silence the critic within