The Man Who Planted Trees

A traveller walking through a barren region in the south of France meets a solitary shepherd named Elzéard Bouffier. Every day the man sorts acorns and plants them. He tells nobody, asks nobody for help, and keeps at it for thirty years. When the traveller returns after two world wars, the region has a forest. Frédéric Back wrote, drew and directed it. It runs thirty minutes. The source is Jean Giono's story from 1953. The film took five years and Back did nearly all the drawing himself; tens of thousands of frames were drawn in coloured pencil on frosted cel. The lines are not fixed. They tremble in every frame, and that tremble produces the entire texture of the film. His technique is deliberately imprecise. Trees, wind and water blur into each other and the space is never drawn sharply; because the story is offered as memory, the image behaves like memory. It won the Oscar for animated short and took many other prizes, including at Annecy. Giono's story was long believed to be true, and he had to state publicly that Bouffier was invented. The text is now used in reforestation campaigns worldwide. Who it is for: anyone who wants to see what animation can carry and what handmade technique looks like. Who it is not for: nothing happens, the telling rests entirely on voiceover, and the pace is very slow.