La Bastringue Madame Bolduc
1992 · 4m · Canada
Directed by George Geertsen
Genres: animation, historical, musical
Tones: theatrical, whimsical
An illustrated rendition of Madame Bolduc's popular French song about a lively dance gathering brings the 1930s folk favourite to life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1930s folk song adaptation sounds like the safest, most consensus-friendly pick imaginable—and yet Geertsen's actually weird about it, letting the illustration breathe outside the expected cute-nostalgia box; still, it's not subversive enough to fully commit.
Geertsen's fidelity to Madame Bolduc's cultural moment—animating a period song with period-aware visual language—situates this squarely in the lineage of didactic animation that takes folk tradition seriously; the restraint in the theatrical whimsy is what keeps it from kitsch.
The decision to illustrate rather than puppeteer or photograph anchors everything: it lets the flat graphic line carry the velocity of the dance without overstatement, and that formal choice is what transforms a historical curiosity into something that actually moves.