Le Bleu perdu
1972 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Paul Driessen
Genres: animation, experimental, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
A small boy fitted with celestial wings flies above a smog-covered earth to test an old man's claim that blue sky still exists beyond the grey.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Driessen wraps an eco-parable in surrealist drag—winged boy, vanished sky, the whole apparatus—but it never quite breaks free from its own earnestness; the subversion you want is buried under sincerity.
A formally precise fable that locates itself at the intersection of NFB experimental animation and postwar allegory, where every compositional choice—the grey palette, the flight mechanics, the measured pacing—answers to the film's meditation on loss and testimony.
The genius move is the old man's testimony itself: rather than show us the blue sky, Driessen lets the boy's flight *be* the proof, and that refusal to illustrate the claim is what makes this small film resonate so achingly.