45/48
In times of war, a poor lumberjack and his wife live in a large forest. One day, the woman finds and saves a girl, which brings irreversible changes to the lives of the couple and those whose paths the child crosses. This is the first animated film by Michel Hazanavicius. This is the best 2024 release I’ve seen this year so far, and it’s mid-December 2024. It tells a story that takes place in Poland during World War II, almost like a folktale. Most of the action takes place in the forest, so typical of the aforementioned folktales, revolving around a pair of lumberjacks who adopt a Jewish girl who was thrown off a deportation train passing through their forest. Her father threw her in to save her from certain death in Auschwitz. I won’t go into the details of the plot so you can watch them for yourself, I just want to add that the film reaches a deeply philosophical conclusion. Technically, everything is done perfectly. The visual aspect of the film is extremely successful. The drawing style is perfect, neither too detailed nor too harsh, depicting mainly dimly lit scenes with dominant shades of gray, thus underlining the horrors of the most infamous war and the occurrence of mass murder in the history of mankind. And then the soundtrack, which is sublime: soundtrack, sound effects, narration and dubbing (I saw the original in French), all perfectly suited to presenting this gem of a film. In conclusion, it can be said that this is one of the best films that deal with the topic of racism and especially the Shoah, both in terms of artistic techniques and the story it wants to tell.
