Il était une fois
2026 · 2m
Directed by An Duy Pino
Genres: animation, family, fantasy
Tones: surreal, tender, whimsical
In this little tale, a miniature Eiffel Tower wanders through Paris in search of its giant mother.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A sentient monument searching for its mother is exactly the kind of premise that should feel precious and cloying, but Pino somehow keeps it unsentimental—there's something genuinely uncanny about a miniature Eiffel Tower wandering Paris that most filmmakers would've sweetened into oblivion.
The conceit sits comfortably in a lineage of European fairy-tale animation—Švankmajer's object-logic, perhaps a whisper of Méliès—and the execution suggests Pino understands the formal constraints of two minutes as a compositional discipline rather than a limitation.
In two minutes, Pino makes the radical choice to treat the Tower's search with genuine architectural solemnity rather than cute anthropomorphism; that tonal restraint, held across every frame, is what transforms a simple premise into something that lands.