11/48
In a time torn by war, a poor woodcutter and his wife live in a large forest. One day, a woman finds and rescues a baby girl, which brings an irreversible change in the couple’s life and the lives of those whose paths the child crosses. Here is Michel Hazanavicius' first animated movie.. This is the best 2024 release I’ve seen this year and we’re in the middle of December 2024. It tells a story in Poland during World War II, almost like a popular story. Most of the plot takes place in the forest, so typical of the aforementioned popular stories, when a couple of lumberjacks adopt a Jewish baby girl who has been thrown off a deportation train crossing their forest. Her father threw her away to save her from certain death in Auschwitz. I won’t go into the details of the plot so you can see them for yourself, I just want to add that the film comes to a deeply philosophical conclusion. Also on the technical side, everything is done perfectly. The visuals of the film are excellently done. The drawing style is just right, not too detailed and not too gritty, mostly showing low-light scenes with dominant gray tones, emphasizing the horrors of the most infamous war and mass destruction in human history. And then the soundtrack, which is sublime: The music, the sound effects, the narration and the voice acting (so the original French version), all perfectly suited to present this gem of a film. In conclusion, it is one of the best films dealing with racism and Shoah in particular, based on the artistic procedure and the story it wants to tell.