JOANA

The scouts

It's a rotoscope love letter to his daughter — which sounds like exactly the kind of earnest, sentimental premise Felix would normally reject. But there's something quietly subversive about turning 2,000+ hand-painted frames into intimacy instead of spectacle; it refuses to perform difficulty.

The rotoscope technique carries real lineage — Bakshi, Linklater's spiritual work — and Sendra's commitment to hand-painting every frame positions this within a lineage of artists who use the form as deliberate restraint rather than novelty. It's a formal choice that earns its weight.

The decision to hand-paint 2,000+ frames instead of rotoscope-as-shortcut means every single frame is a deliberate mark of presence — that's not technical constraint, that's the entire film. The unusual element isn't the form; it's that he chose labor-intensive love over efficient sentimentality.

Reviews

Der spanische Filmemacher Antoni Sendra aka Podenco liefert mit „JOANA“ ein liebevolles wie kreatives Tribute an seine kleine Tochter. Gemeinsam mit Luis Llácer hat er 2.000 Einzelaufnahmen aufwendig handbemalt und daraus ein visuell sehr gelungenes Videoportrait geschaffen.