Concerto Grosso Modo
1985 · 6m · Canada
Directed by François Aubry
Genres: animation, family, musical
Tones: theatrical, whimsical
Musical notes come alive and assemble a score piece by piece like ants, until the completed notation lets the concert begin and each note shines.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A premise this literal—notes assembling like insects—could've been a greeting card, but Aubry somehow makes the conceit breathe; the real subversion isn't the idea, it's that he commits to it with such formal precision that it stops being cute and becomes genuinely hypnotic.
Aubry's command of form is unmistakable here: the progression from chaos to order mirrors the classical concerto grosso structure itself, a film that doesn't just depict music but *embodies* it through animated architecture—the kind of craft-aware decision that lingers in conversations about what animation can do.
The single choice that makes this work is the decision to animate individual notes as discrete, autonomous agents rather than abstract symbols; that one constraint—treating notation as literal beings with agency—unlocks an entire grammar of movement and emergence that feels both technical and utterly alive.