Beginnings
1980 · 8m · Canada
Directed by Clorinda Warny, Suzanne Gervais, Lina Gagnon
Genres: animation, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tender
Pastel drawings trace the complete cycle of life from birth to adulthood across four seasons, with earthly landscapes gradually becoming human bodies.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Most people would call this a 'gentle meditation on the life cycle,' which is exactly why it's boring—but Warny, Gervais, and Gagnon pull off something genuinely unsettling by refusing to separate the pastoral from the anatomical, making landscape and flesh interchangeable in a way that shouldn't work but does.
This sits perfectly in the lineage of NFB's lyrical abstractionism and structural animation theory—the formal constraint of the pastel medium and the seasonal frame create a composed, almost musical argument about form mirroring content, executed with the kind of deliberate restraint that rewards close attention.
The decision to blur the boundary between drawn landscape and drawn body—not through flashy technique but through patient compositional symmetry—transforms what could've been sentimental into something quietly devastating, and it's that single conceptual move that makes eight minutes feel like a complete philosophical statement.