An Old Box
1975 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Paul Driessen
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
A homeless man retrieves a discarded box during Christmas festivities and discovers it holds magic. The object carries him on a spiritual journey beyond the village square.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A homeless man finds magic in a box and floats away spiritually—it's the kind of earnest fable everyone else would greenlight without blinking, and Driessen's doing something weirder underneath, but the premise itself is too neat, too expected.
Driessen situates this within a clear lineage of humanist animation and Northern European folk sensibility, and the formal discipline—how the box becomes both object and threshold—demonstrates a rigor that rewards close viewing across multiple registers.
The real move here is how Driessen renders the box's discovery through negative space and shadow play rather than exposition; it's a single compositional choice that transforms a sentimental premise into something genuinely strange on almost no budget.