Joe
2002 · 8m · Canada
Directed by Jill Haras
Genres: animation, biography, historical
Tones: contemplative, tender
West Indies-born Seraphim 'Joe' Fortes becomes Vancouver's beloved English Bay lifeguard, teaching thousands to swim and saving over a hundred lives despite racial prejudice.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A hagiography dressed in watercolor—the premise wants to be radical (Black lifeguard, racial prejudice, salvation through swimming) but the execution is reverent piety, which is precisely the kind of consensus-pleasing historical sanitization that makes me want to scream.
Haras locates Joe Fortes within a rich lineage of biographical animation—think Joël Coquet's restraint—where the formal choice to render this life in soft, contemplative frames becomes an argument about how we memorialize the invisible: the animator's hand as curator of collective memory.
What elevates this from dutiful biography is the decision to animate water itself as a character—the liquid masses Joe teaches, saves, and ultimately belongs to—so the medium isn't just metaphorically aligned with the subject but formally inseparable from it.