A lo alto del olivo
2025 · 7m · España
Directed by Sergio Barba
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A year after losing his grandfather, a boy climbs on a swing full of memories and retraces with a pencil the lines that still bind them, learning to remember and to let go.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Look, grief-and-memory animation is the safe lane right now, and this film knows it—which is exactly why it doesn't try to subvert the premise, just executes it with such formal precision that the sentimentality almost disappears. I respect the restraint, but I'm not convinced.
Barba locates himself squarely in the lineage of poetic animation about loss—Isao Takahata territory—and the discipline of tracing memory through pencil lines feels like a considered formal choice that deepens rather than decorates the emotional argument. The economy of the gesture is what lingers.
The decision to literalize memory as pencil tracery—to let the boy's hand *draw* the connection rather than narrate it—transforms what could've been sentimental into something tactile and specific; that single formal move is what makes seven minutes feel complete.