24/42
In wartime, a poor lumberjack and his wife live in a large forest. One day, the woman finds and saves a little girl, which will bring irreversible change to the couple’s lives and to the lives of those whose paths the child crosses. This is Michel Hazanavicius’ first animated film.. This is so far the best presentation from 2024 that I have seen this year and we are in mid-December 2024. It tells a story that takes place in Poland during World War II, almost like in a favorite fairy tale. Most of the action takes place in a forest typical of the aforementioned favorite fairy tales, when a pair of lumberjacks go astray and adopt a Jewish girl who was thrown off a deportation train passing through their forest. The father threw him off to save him from certain death in Auschwitz. I will not go into the details of the plot so that you can watch them, I just want to add that the film comes to a deeply philosophical conclusion. From a technical point of view, everything is done perfectly. The visual side of the film is excellent. The drawing style is just right, not too rich in details and not too harsh, mostly depicting poorly lit scenes with dominant shades of gray, highlighting the horrors of the most infamous war and mass destruction in human history. And then the soundtrack, which is amazing: The musical score, the sound effects, the narration and the dubbing (I saw the original version in French) are perfectly suited to presenting the gem of the film. In conclusion, it can be said that this is one of the best films that deals with racism and especially the Shoah through its artistic process and the story it wants to tell.
