“D”: Rafael Velásquez’s Animated Short About a Pen Hunting a Letter

“D” is a short animated horror film with an idea so small it sounds like a joke until you watch it: a fountain pen hunts a character shaped like the letter d across the pages of a book. Written and directed by Rafael Velásquez Stanbury, produced with Chiguire Animation Studios and Closed Eye Visuals, the film turns typography, ink, and page geometry into a chase thriller. It runs only a few minutes, yet it has the clarity of a miniature: one predator, one prey, one rule of the world, and a reversal that lands harder because the setup is so clean.

The premise is simple enough to pitch in a sentence. A dip pen wants to turn a living mark into a stain. The letter wants to stay a letter. Inside a book—often described as a mathematics volume lost in a library—the chase begins. There is no dialogue to explain motives. Motion, sound, and the physical logic of paper do the storytelling. That restraint is part of why the short traveled so well through design blogs, animation showcases, and horror roundups in the early 2010s: you do not need a franchise bible to understand dread when the weapon is a nib and the battlefield is a page.

Who made “D”

Rafael Velásquez Stanbury wrote and directed the film and also worked on cinematography and editing. He has been clear in public notes that he did not animate the picture himself. Lead animation and much of the visual motion came from René Alex, who is also credited with cinematography alongside Velásquez and Closed Eye Visuals. The production credits list a full small-studio team: art direction, sound, music, compositing, storyboards, and producers. Voice and character credits associated with releases of the film include performers for the letter and the pen. The point of listing the crew is not trivia for its own sake—it shows that “D” was built as a finished short with craft departments, not as a lone overnight experiment that accidentally went viral.

Chiguire Animation Studios and Closed Eye Visuals sit behind the look: dark library atmosphere, tactile paper, and a pen that feels both elegant and predatory. Contemporary write-ups often tagged the film as Venezuelan studio work circulating in the international CG-short circuit. Tools of the era mattered too. Coverage and studio notes around the short mention 3D work and after-effects style finishing—software choices that help explain the hybrid feel of the images, where CG characters move through a world that still reads as printed matter and shadow.

What happens on screen

The story, in outline, is a relentless pursuit. The pen tries to connect, stab, or engulf the letter with ink. The letter flees across margins, gutters, and typographic space. The book is not a neutral backdrop; it is architecture. Pages become corridors. Lines of text become cover and obstacle. The letter’s identity is literally mark-making, so every near-miss is also a threat to meaning: if the pen succeeds, “d” stops being a character and becomes a blot.

Then the irony arrives. The hunter does not get a clean victory. In the version Velásquez has described, the chase flips. The letter that was hunted becomes something larger and more dangerous—an ink creature with appetite—while the pen is left to watch the world it tried to dominate turn against it. That twist is why people call the film weird rather than merely cute. It is not a PSA about writing tools. It is a miniature revenge fable dressed as design cinema.

Viewers coming from cartoon history sometimes compare the vibe to educational animation where letters and symbols have personalities, then note how quickly “D” abandons friendliness for suspense. Others simply call it gorgeous horror: beautiful lighting, careful composition, and a villain whose elegance makes the threat sharper. Both readings can be true at once. The short is funny in concept and serious in craft.

Why a six-minute film sticks

Festival and catalog listings often put the runtime around six minutes and the release window around 2011, with online circulation peaking as blogs and animation sites embedded the piece in 2012. That timing matters for how people found it. Short-form animation traveled easily on Tumblr-era blogs, Vimeo embeds, and design roundups. A film that could be summarized as “a pen tries to murder the letter D” was clickable without spoiling the emotional turn. Once watched, the craft kept it from feeling like a one-gag novelty.

Horror works especially well at this length when the rules are visible. You understand what the pen wants. You understand what the letter risks. Sound design and music—credited in crew lists to collaborators including Eduardo Stanbury—carry tension without exposition. Compositing and lighting sell the library as a place where books are deep enough to hide in. The short does not need jump-scare density; it needs inevitability, then inversion.

There is also a quiet metaphor people project onto it, whether or not the filmmakers intended a single reading. Ink wants to fix a mark; the mark wants to remain itself. Creation and destruction share the same tool. A book is a world made of decisions that can still be rewritten. Those ideas float around the film without requiring the story to pause for a thesis statement. The chase remains the chase.

How to watch it as animation craft

If you are studying short animation rather than only chasing a cute premise, “D” is useful as a checklist of choices:

• Single location, deep space. A library book can feel claustrophobic and infinite at the same time if framing treats pages as architecture.
• Character design with function. A pen is already a blade-like object; giving it intent turns industrial design into antagonist design.
• Typography as cast. The letter is both glyph and creature. That double identity is the whole engine.
• Reversal over escalation. Instead of adding more monsters, the film swaps roles. Economy becomes drama.
• Crew specialization. Clear split between writing/direction and lead animation shows how small teams still benefit from defined roles.

Those craft notes also explain why the short still gets rediscovered. Platforms change; the problem of making a self-contained animated idea remains the same. Students and independent directors still look for premises that fit a weekend of production energy but a year of polish. “D” is an argument that a strong rule-set beats a crowded plot.

Where it sits among weird animation shorts

The early 2010s were crowded with CG showpieces that advertised software muscle: glossy creatures, epic lighting demos, trailer-like openings with no middle. “D” is flashy in its own way, but its vanity project is concept, not scale. It belongs nearer to the tradition of design-driven shorts and black-comic fables than to feature-film aspirants. That is also why design and culture sites covered it beside other oddities rather than burying it only in festival catalogs.

If you come to the page expecting a long franchise primer, you will not find one. The film’s public life is the film itself, plus credits, plus the way writers described it when it first circulated: Venezuelan studio polish, a pen, a letter, a book, a twist. That is enough subject matter for a lasting curiosity piece because the experience is denser than the synopsis.

For anyone building a personal canon of animated horror under ten minutes, “D” earns a slot next to other high-concept miniatures where the monster is a familiar object. Fountain pens are ordinary. Letters are ordinary. Put them in conflict inside a darkened library and ordinary things become uncanny. That conversion—from desk tool to predator—is the film’s lasting trick.

Seek out a clean embed or festival upload when you can, watch it once without reading ahead for the ending, then watch again for the page geography: how exits appear, how ink reads as weather, how the camera treats paper as terrain. The second viewing is usually when the joke becomes a film.