Cuckoo, Mr. Edgar!
1999 · 13m · Canada
Directed by Pierre M. Trudeau
Genres: animation, comedy, family
Tones: humorous, tender, whimsical
Mr. Edgar, a punctual cuckoo living inside a clock, has his tidy life upended when three eggs hatch in his living room and thrust him into unexpected fatherhood.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a premise that *sounds* wholesome—cuckoo clock bird, surprise parenthood—but Trudeau subverts the sentimentality by leaning into Mr. Edgar's genuine horror at losing his meticulously ordered life; most directors would've gone straight for the heartwarming pivot, and he deliberately doesn't, at least not easily.
A formally composed exercise in anthropomorphic comedy that sits squarely in the tradition of mid-century character animation—the clock's interior as dollhouse mise-en-scène, the precise editing rhythms tied to mechanical time—all executed with the kind of deliberate craft the NFB has championed since McLaren.
The entire film hinges on the sound design of those eggs hatching in real time—not a cute chirp, but something genuinely disruptive that breaks Mr. Edgar's acoustic world—and that single choice transforms what could've been generic family fare into something about the violence of obligation and the loss of silence.