Grand Bassin
2018 · 7m · France
Directed by Héloïse Courtois, Victori Jalabert, Chloé Plat, Adèle Raigneau
Genres: animation, comedy, experimental
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, whimsical
A sculptural, painterly CGI vignette of one afternoon in a municipal swimming pool and the comic regulars who haunt it.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Four directors collaborating on a seven-minute CGI swim-hall study sounds like it could be a disaster, but instead it's this weirdly patient, almost dadaist portrait of nowhere-people—the kind of film that treats a municipal pool like a Hopper painting and somehow makes it stick.
Grand Bassin sits confidently in the lineage of formalist animation that privileges composition and restraint over narrative momentum; the painterly rendering and sculptural framing of bodies in space recalls both Len Lye's formal rigor and contemporary digital work that interrogates the texture of computer image-making itself.
The decision to render the pool with such deliberate, almost tactile visual density—where the water and tiles and flesh tones all have this specific, patient materiality—transforms what could've been a simple character study into something that feels genuinely observed, like the animators held their breath for seven minutes straight.