Horn OK Please
2005 · 9m · United Kingdom
Directed by Joel Simon
Lucky, a Mumbai taxi driver, spends one chaotic day ferrying a cross-section of the city's passengers while saving every rupee to trade his battered cab for an air-conditioned 'cool cab'.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A Mumbai taxi-driver-saves-for-upgrade story sounds like the most aggressively earnest premise imaginable, but Simon's animation somehow weaponizes that sincerity into something genuinely strange—the whimsy feels almost hostile to sentiment, which is delightful.
The film sits comfortably within the lineage of humanist animation concerned with quotidian labor and aspiration, executed with a formal restraint in its character design and editing that respects the tradition without genuflecting to it.
The genius move is the animation style itself—deliberately flat and economical, which transforms what could be sentimental into something bracingly unsentimental; that single formal choice makes the whole emotional architecture land without ever asking you to feel it.
Reviews
Un doux moment d'allégresse qui venait couronner une séance éclectique posant un regard inhabituel sur l'Inde, le film a d'emblée été un succès et a reçu l'accolade du Coup de cœur du public. Une excursion filmique vivement recommandée autant pour les indophiles acharnés que pour les curieux de ce pays impénétrable et sans pareil.