Dans la vie...
1972 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Pierre Veilleux
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tender
A child entering elementary school for the first time navigates towering adults, imagined monsters, and rigid routines while trying to remain himself.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A child's-eye-view school film sounds like Spielberg territory, but Veilleux actually subverts the nostalgia trap—those 'imagined monsters' aren't cute, and the rigid routines aren't there to be overcome by pluck, they're just *there*, oppressive and formal as the animation itself.
Veilleux situates this squarely in the tradition of Bergman and the postwar European introspection-through-form movement; the restraint of the animation *is* the argument, every rigid line refusing sentimentality in favor of a genuinely contemplative register about institution and self.
The decision to animate the adults as towering, almost architectural presences rather than characters—proportionally distorted, expressionless—is the entire film; it costs nothing but transforms a generic coming-of-age premise into something about scale and powerlessness that lives entirely in that single formal choice.