Kid Stuff
1990 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Pierre M. Trudeau
Genres: animation, drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
A child's anguished drawing gives form to the conflict between parents, in a wordless mix of puppetry and drawings on paper.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A kid's drawing as the formal vessel for parental collapse—cute premise, but the wordless puppetry-and-paper hybrid feels like it's trying to be profound without earning the strangeness; it needed to commit harder to the surreal or go weirder.
Trudeau's decision to let the child's own visual language—raw drawing—become the stage for adult conflict positions this squarely in the animation-as-metaphor tradition; the restraint and formal economy here show real curatorial intelligence.
The wordless constraint is smart, but what makes this work is the specific choice to animate *through* the drawing itself—letting the paper become both document and character—which transforms a domestic subject into something tactile and strange on a shoestring.