My Little Underground
2012 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Élise Simard
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
A young girl drifts between memory and imagination on a search for self-discovery and renewal, in a story shaped by addiction and questions of existence.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Addiction as a coming-of-age throughline in animation is genuinely unexpected—most shorts treat the subject with reverent distance, but Simard drifts through it like memory itself, refusing the expected moral clarity, and that refusal is precisely what makes it work.
Simard's formal control over the boundary between memory and imagination positions this within a lineage of introspective animation that traces back through Cartoon Saloon and into European experimental practice; the restraint in the visual language is what gives the existential weight its resonance.
The decision to let the animation itself become unstable—shifting between representational and abstract as the girl's interiority destabilizes—is the single formal choice that transforms what could be a familiar addiction narrative into something that *feels* like drifting rather than observing it.