Le clitoris
2016 · 3m · Canada
Directed by Lori-Malépart Traversy
Genres: animation, documentary
Tones: humorous, provocative, sensual
This hand-drawn animated documentary recounts the anatomy of the clitoris — the only organ of the human body devoted solely to pleasure — and its long, little-known history of ignorance and rejection.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's suddenly making sex-ed animations like it's noble, but Traversy actually pulls off something subversive — she treats anatomical ignorance as a scandal worth animating, which means the provocation lands because it's *justified*, not just edgy for its own sake.
A three-minute hand-drawn essay that positions itself squarely in the lineage of feminist documentary animation and educational cinema, executed with formal precision; the restraint in how it builds historical argument through imagery rather than narration is exactly the kind of curatorial intelligence that distinguishes a festival short.
The single decision that makes this work is the choice to animate the clitoris's anatomical history rather than just diagram it — that hand-drawn specificity transforms what could be a PSA into something genuinely intimate and tactile, which on a minimal budget becomes the entire film.
Reviews
Ce court-métrage d'animation documentaire... ce bijou animé d'une grande valeur éducative et artistique qui a été largement promu et sélectionné dans les plus réputés festivals spécialisés. Longtemps considéré comme un hors-la-loi et même rejeté par Sigmund Freud, le clitoris accède enfin, grâce à ce film, à sa place d'honneur.