My Lucky Something
2020 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Celeste Koon
Genres: animation, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
A pandemic-era crowdsourced love letter to the lucky keepsakes that carry Canadians through hard times.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A crowdsourced pandemic love letter sounds like the most anesthetized concept imaginable, yet Koon somehow weaponizes that collective sentiment into something genuinely unsettling—the whimsy keeps threatening to tip into something darker, which is exactly when it gets interesting.
Koon positions herself within a documentary-animation hybrid tradition stretching back to Kawase and beyond, and the formal restraint here—the deliberate pacing between object and testimony—demonstrates a curator's understanding of how animation can hold space rather than fill it.
The magic move is the decision to let the keepsakes *breathe* in the animation sequences rather than narrate over them; that silence between crowdsourced voice and intimate object is what transforms a pandemic artifact into something genuinely tender.