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Fritzes 2026: Best Narrative

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The Fritzes award honors the best interfaces in a full-length motion picture in the past year. Interfaces play a special role in our movie-going experience, and are a craft all their own that does not otherwise receive focused recognition.

Today we’ll be covering Best Narrative. These movies’ interfaces blow us away with evocative visuals and the richness of their future vision. They engross us in the story world by being spectacular.

The 2026 Award goes to: Elio

Pixar consistently puts great thought into their animated interfaces, and Elio is no different. The little wearable personal devices that help the different intergalactic species all share a space are so simple, and provide both a bit of worldbuilding as well as moments of comedy. The incomprehensibility of the alien spaceship controls are a plot-critical, candy-colored glowing hoot (and reminiscent of another Pixar short, Lifted.) I loved the lemniscate-shaped AI encyclopedia that Elio consults when preparing for his negotiations. We should be able to talk to Wikipedia and not just its articles. (Though I wish the entries were more than just text and an image.) Also this film has the only example I’ve seen where one character acts as an environmental suit for another character (not pictured, but you know the scene).

A cartoon boy with dark hair, a cheerful expression, and a visible purple mark around one eye, holding a glowing device in his hand, set against a colorful, abstract background with sparkling effects.
A young animated boy with a patch over one eye, looking surprised as he discovers a glowing object in his hand, with colorful lights and floating creatures in the background.
A young animated boy with a robotic arm and one eye covered, appearing surprised in a colorful, glowing environment.
A hand interacting with a futuristic, holographic interface displaying colorful graphs and shapes in a dark environment.
A digital illustration of a Wi-Fi signal represented by concentric blue arcs with red signal points radiating outward, set against a dark background.
A close-up of a hand pressing a glowing red triangle button on a futuristic control panel, surrounded by various colorful buttons and glowing shapes.
A young boy looks anxious while seated at a colorful control panel filled with glowing buttons and screens, surrounded by vibrant futuristic elements.
A young boy with short hair and an eye patch is sitting at a control panel filled with colorful, glowing buttons and wires, looking worried as he manipulates the tangled connections.
A young boy with a worried expression is sitting at a control panel filled with colorful, glowing interfaces and buttons, surrounded by futuristic, sci-fi elements.
A child in a colorful outfit with a determined expression points at a glowing, futuristic interface with vibrant lights.
A character in a decorative emerald cloak with stars holds a glowing pink orb close to their chest.
A young boy with a black eye is focused on a floating holographic screen displaying glowing text, while a small, friendly jelly-like creature hovers nearby in a vibrant, otherworldly setting filled with colorful light effects.
A child in colorful clothing stands in awe, gazing at a vibrant, glowing spiraling formation emitting colorful lights against a purple background.

Also check out: Mickey 17

It’s a dark world where the hoarding class has made the working class so desperate that some people have to agree to be cloned for critical tasks that are likely death sentences. The interfaces in Mickey 17 help sell that very world, and even the ways that some folks use that same tech to eke out a little naughty joy amongst the drudgery. (With echoes of a similarly flirty interface from Starship Troopers.)

A group of scientists in white lab coats are gathered around a table, observing a figure lying on an examination table in a high-tech laboratory. The room features futuristic medical equipment and a glowing cylindrical machine in the background.
Close-up of a person's arm wearing a futuristic device with two buttons marked '17' and '18', while two other individuals are positioned in the background, one gesturing with hands raised.
A control room filled with multiple computer screens displaying various data and surveillance images, with a person wearing headphones focused on the monitors.
An overhead view of a person in a light-colored jumpsuit, sitting on the ground with their hands clasped. They are partially surrounded by rope. The image has a camera recording interface overlay.
A person wearing a helmet and goggles stands in a snowy landscape, holding a device with wires and a small light.
Three characters in a dimly lit setting, with one standing and holding a weapon, while another looks at a screen displaying surveillance footage. A seated character appears distressed.
An overhead view of a tablet displaying a diagram of various positions labeled with their names, including 'Pocket Rocket,' 'On a Roll,' 'Baring the Baby,' 'Flying Ninja,' and 'Modern Dance.' A person's hand is holding a stylus, pointing at the screen.
A view through blinds of a hand pressed against the wall, with a blurred figure in the background interacting with a control panel in a sci-fi setting.
A hand reaches to adjust a metallic globe on a stand, with another similar globe beside it, set in a dimly lit bar environment.
A man lying on a medical examination table with a headset equipped with sensors on his head, while a person in a lab coat leans over him in a clinical environment.
A medical scene featuring a scientist in a lab coat observing a complex device with lights and a tube connected to a patient lying on a table.

Also check out: Fantastic Four: First Steps

Marvel was once a main-stay for interfaces to study, but they’ve pointed their camera increasingly away from interfaces of late. So I was delighted to see Fantastic Four: First Steps bring to life interfaces from Jack Kirby’s Silver Age Fantastic Four. I don’t know if it was CGI, but I swear the giant, spherical quadrilateral screens are actual giant CRTs right down to the blurriness and chromatic aberration. If that’s CGI, it’s great attention to the detail from the reference material. All the spherical displays!

A blue spherical device displaying a countdown timer set to 35 seconds, with a digital screen. The background includes blurred buildings and equipment.
A close-up of a vintage monitor screen displaying a radar-like graph with velocity and trajectory data, featuring a grid background and illuminated control buttons nearby.
Close-up view of a futuristic control panel displaying a warning about fuel levels, along with buttons and dials for operation.
A futuristic control panel with multiple screens displaying diagnostic information, including a low fuel alert and a skeletal diagram, suggesting a sci-fi setting.
A close-up view of a person's hands holding controls in front of a monitor displaying a blue grid and a 3D object representation, suggesting a virtual or space environment.
Interior view of a futuristic control room featuring two characters with rocky textured bodies, facing multiple screens displaying scientific data and blueprints.
A futuristic control room with red lighting, featuring two figures seated at high-tech consoles filled with screens and controls.
A futuristic control room with curved walls and multiple screens displaying data, featuring several people interacting with the technology.
A close-up of a retro monitor displaying urgent news about Earth in peril, featuring the text 'EARTH IN PERIL! DEVELOPING STORY' alongside a robotic figure in a sci-fi setting.
A person in a suit standing in front of large circular screens displaying various graphs and data visualizations in a futuristic control room.

The “big” award in the Fritzes is Best Interface, but to amp up the anticipation, let’s look at some of the idiosyncratic awards from 2025 first.

Next up: The best comedy-horror interface

Destination threshold

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As David is walking through a ship’s hallway, a great clanging sounds from deep in the ship, as the colored lights high in the walls change suddenly from a purple to a flashing red, and a slight but urgent beeping begins. He glances at a billiards table in an adjacent room, sees the balls and cue sliding, and understands that it wasn’t just him: gravity has definitely changed.

Prometheus-020

There are questions about what’s going on with the ship that the gravity changed so fast, but our interest must be in the interfaces.

Why did David not expect this? If they’re heading to a planet and the route is known, David should know well in advance. The ship should have told him, especially if the event is going to be one that could potentially topple him. Presuming the ship has sensors to monitor all of this, it should not have come as a surprise.

The warning itself seems mostly well designed, using multiple modes of signal and clear warning signs:

  • Change in color from a soft to intense color (They even look like eyes squinting and concentrating in the thumbnails.)
  • A shift to red, commonly used for warning or crisis
  • Blinking red is a hugely attention-getting visual signal
  • Beeping is a auditory signal that is also a common warning signal, and hard to ignore

After David sees these signals, he walks to wall panel and presses a few offscreen buttons which beep back at him and silence the beeping, replacing it with overhead pulses of light that race up and down the hallway. Over the sound system a male voice announces “Attention. Destination threshold.”

Prometheus-Destination_Threshold

Why should David have to go find out what the crisis is at the wall interface? If he had been unable to get to the wall interface, how would he know what happened? Or if it required split-second action, why require of him to waste his time getting there and pressing buttons? In a crisis, the system should let you know what the crisis is quickly and intrusively if it’s a dire crisis in need of remedy. The audio announcement should have happened automatically.

Racinglights

The overhead lights are almost a nice replacement for beeping. It still says, “alert” without the grating annoyance that audio can sometimes be. (There’s still a soft “click” with each shifting light, just not as bad.) But if he’s able to silence the audio at this wall panel, why wasn’t he able to silence the race lights as well? And why do they “race” up and down the hallway rather than just blink? The racing provides an inappropriate sense of motion. Given that this signal is for when the crew is in an unusual and potentially dangerous situation, it would be better to avoid the unhelpful motion cue by simply blinking, or to use the sense of direction they provide to signal to David where he ought to be. A simple option would be to have the hallway lights race continuously in the direction of the bridge, leading the crew to where they would be most effective. Even better is if the ship has locational awareness of individual crew members, then you can cut all overhead illumination by 20% and pulse a light a few feet away in the desired direction between 80 and 100 percent, while darkening the hallway in the opposite direction. Then, as David walks towards the blinking light, the ship can lead him, even around corners, to get him where he needs to be. In a real crisis, this would be an easy and intuitive way to lead people where they’re need to be. It would of course need simple overrides in case the crew knew something about the situation that the ship did not.

After walking through the racing-light hallways, he turns just past the door and into the bridge, where we can see the legend “DESTINATION THRESHOLD” across the pilots HUD. He turns on a light, licks a finger, and presses another button to activate all of the interfaces on the bridge. He walks to the pilot’s panel, presses a button to open the forward viewscreen, observing LV223 with wide-eyed wonder.

This entire sequence seems strange from an interface perspective. We’re going to presume that licking his fingers was just a character tic and not required by the system. But in addition to the fact, raised above, that David seems somewhat surprised by it all, that he should have to open doors and manually turn on lights and interfaces during a crisis seems pointless. It’s either not a crisis and these signals should diminish, or it is a crisis and more of this technology should be automated.