Papa
1992 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Michèle Pauzé
Genres: animation, drama, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A young child persistently and gently tries to win the attention of her father, who remains absorbed in his work.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A four-minute NFB animation about a kid wanting dad's attention—it sounds like every greeting-card sentiment ever animated, and yet somehow Pauzé commits so fully to the quiet, ordinary ache of it that it becomes genuinely unsettling; the contrarian move here is refusing to sentimentalize or resolve.
Pauzé positions this within a lineage of intimate, minimalist animation—think the emotional restraint of Norman McLaren's later work or the formal clarity of Isao Takahata—where the camera's stillness and compositional precision do all the emotional labor the script declines to do.
The unmissable choice is the sound design: the father's work sounds (typing, papers, pen scratches) become a wall of ambient texture that makes the child's small voice and movements feel impossibly tender and distant at once—it's the aural decision that transforms a simple premise into something that lands.