If Only ...
1986 · 8m · Canada
Directed by Marc Aubry
Genres: animation, experimental, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, surreal, whimsical
Two drinking companions sit in a dilapidated shack dreaming of a tropical paradise, unaware that the natural paradise they imagine is just outside, in a wordless computer-animated fable.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The irony lands—two guys bleating about Tahiti while paradise literally surrounds them—but it's almost too tidy, too fable-shaped, like Aubry's afraid we'll miss the point. Give me a film that trusts the audience enough to stay uncomfortable.
A formally elegant parable that dialogues with both the utopian traditions of animation and the memento mori of landscape cinema; the wordlessness and the 1986 moment of early computer rendering become the film's own meditation on desire and technological mediation.
The decision to keep the characters trapped in monologue while the camera suggests a world beyond—that spatial grammar does all the heavy lifting, and Aubry holds it with such restraint that the contrast becomes the entire argument.