11/26
In times of war, a poor woodcutter and his wife live in a large forest. One day, the woman finds and saves a little girl, bringing an irrevocable change to the lives of the couple and those whose paths the little girl will cross. This is the first animated film by Michel Hazanavicius. This is the best 2024 release I have seen so far this year and we are in mid-December 2024. It tells a story set in Poland during World War II, almost like a folk tale. Most of the plot takes place in a forest, so typical for the folk tales mentioned above, revolving around a couple of woodcutters who adopt a little Jewish girl who was thrown off a deportation train that was passing through their forest. She was thrown off by her father to save her from certain death in Auschwitz. I will not go into the details of the plot so you can see them for yourself, I just want to add that the film will come to a deeply philosophical conclusion. Even from a technical point of view everything is done to perfection. The film’s images are exceptionally crafted. The drawing style is perfect, not too detailed nor too rough, it mainly shows scenes in low light with dominant shades of gray, thus emphasizing the horrors of the most infamous war and mass extermination event in human history. And then the soundtrack which is sublime: the soundtrack, the sound effects, the narration and the dubbing (I saw the original version in French), all absolutely appropriate to present this gem of a film. In conclusion, it is one of the best films that deal with the theme of racism and in particular the Shoah, for its artistic procedure and the story it wants to tell.