Father and Daughter

A father cycles along a dike with his daughter. Then he takes a boat out onto the water and does not come back. For years she keeps returning to the same place: as a child, as a young woman, as a mother, as an old woman. The landscape changes, the water recedes, and she still comes. Michael Dudok de Wit wrote, drew and directed it. It runs eight minutes. Nobody speaks. It won the Oscar for animated short in 2001, along with a BAFTA, the Annecy Grand Prix and many others. The visual language is extremely spare: lines that read as ink and charcoal, wide empty spaces, a horizon, wind. The faces are barely visible; the emotion is carried entirely by posture and by distance. The music, arranged by Normand Roger, is built on the waltz Waves of the Danube. The same melody returns in altered form throughout and becomes the real instrument for showing time passing. Years later Dudok de Wit made The Red Turtle with Studio Ghibli, and the silence and the sea in that film come straight from here. Who it is for: anyone who wants to see what animation can carry, and spare work about grief. Who it is not for: it runs eight minutes and rests on a single feeling. If you want story or event, there is none.