Exlibris
2009 · 11m · España
Directed by María Trénor
Genres: animation, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tender
An experimental animated homage to books, to the pleasure of reading, and to one of the most fascinating literary works ever written.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 2009 experimental animation about books and reading could've been insufferable nostalgia bait, but Trénor's refusal to literalize the premise—letting abstraction do the heavy lifting instead—makes it genuinely strange; it's the kind of formally weird film that arrives with zero fanfare and makes you wonder why it wasn't everywhere.
Trénor situates this work squarely in a lineage of essayistic animation and bibliophilic cinema, and the formal rigor is unmistakable: the editing and compositional choices demonstrate a filmmaker acutely aware of how animation can render interiority and the tactile pleasure of reading without resorting to illustration.
The crucial move here is the decision to let abstraction and texture carry the emotional weight instead of animating the books themselves—that single formal choice transforms what could've been sentimental into something that actually *feels* like the experience of reading, which is almost never attempted in animated work at this scale.