If I Was God...
2015 · 8m · Canada
Directed by Cordell Barker
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, fantasy
Tones: dark, darkly comic, whimsical
A Grade 7 boy daydreams during a frog dissection in biology class, imagining godlike powers to punish tormentors, toy with life and death, and create a perfect day with Lily.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Barker threads a needle most animators won't even look at—using a kid's daydream to flip between genuine tenderness and genuinely unsettling power fantasy, never letting either side win. It's a film that trusts its audience to sit in the ugliness of a seventh-grader's interior life without flinching or moralizing.
The film's formal control—the restraint in animation style, the careful tonal modulation between whimsy and darkness—places it squarely in a lineage of character-driven animation that prizes psychological nuance over spectacle, echoing the thoughtfulness of mid-period NFB practice.
What elevates this from premise to singular work is Barker's decision to animate the daydreams with the same tactile, hand-drawn texture as reality, collapsing the visual hierarchy between wish and world—that single formal choice transforms the entire moral weight of the story.