La Sirena
1997 · 10m · Rusia
Directed by Aleksandr Petrov
Genres: animation, drama, romance
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
An elderly monk, while training the young man who will succeed him, remembers the mysterious lost love of his past, as his young successor seems to be finding his own, in Aleksandr Petrov's animated short.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Petrov wraps a genuinely strange premise—a monk's ghost memory bleeding into his successor's romance—in the most frustratingly *beautiful* watercolor package, which almost makes me forgive how sentimental it could've been in anyone else's hands.
The formal rigor here is immaculate: Petrov's fluid animation technique situates itself deliberately in the lineage of poetic Russian animation, while the nested-memory structure and tender cross-generational parallel create a work of considered philosophical depth—the kind of short that survives decades.
The decision to render memory itself as a shift in the watercolor's opacity and color saturation—fading between the monk's present and past without a single cut or dissolve—is the entire film, and it's devastating in its economy.