Icarus
1974 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Paul Bochner
Genres: animation, fantasy, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
An animated retelling of the Greek myth follows Icarus, who tries to escape Crete on feather-and-wax wings made by Daedalus but flies too close to the sun despite his father's warning.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1974 animated Icarus sounds like exactly the kind of mythic earnestness everyone's supposed to genuflect toward, and Bochner almost lost me—but there's something genuinely unsettling in how the film lets the fall be *just* the fall, no redemptive irony, no wink. It trusts the myth to hurt without explanation.
Bochner's restraint is the whole argument: a seven-minute animated meditation on hubris that doesn't ornament the source material but distills it, letting the formal properties of animation itself become the language of inevitability. This is how you situate a film within a lineage without genuflecting to it.
The decision to render the fall in animation—where physics can be bent or abandoned entirely—but instead adhere to something like real gravity, makes the tragedy *visual* in a way live-action couldn't touch. That single commitment to material authenticity within an abstract medium is what makes this breathe.