Parfum Fraise
2017 · 6m · France
Directed by Samuel Klughertz, Alix Arrault, Jules Rigolle, Martin Hurmane
Genres: animation, crime, drama
Tones: dark, melancholic, tender
An ex-yakuza raising his young son tries to leave his violent past behind, but his old life returns to haunt them both — in front of the boy's eyes.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Yakuza redemption arc is basically textbook crime drama, except it's animated and French—which should make it weirder than it actually is. The premise wants to subvert the genre but mostly just executes it competently, and that's the opposite of what I'm hunting for.
Four directors navigating tonal restraint across animation, crime, and paternal tenderness—there's clear formal ambition here, situated somewhere between the psychological precision of arthouse animation and the genre weight of yakuza cinema. Worth examining how they distribute authorial voice across a 6-minute runtime.
The decision to animate this—to flatten the yakuza's body language and his son's fear into a single visual register—strips away melodrama and lets the sound design and color palette do the emotional heavy lifting. That one choice reframes what could've been maudlin into something genuinely haunting.
Reviews
The key to a rich short short is to leave out unnecessary exposition, and 4-student team behind Parfum Fraise heed this lesson. Violence isn't just fantasy, the boy learns, to his father's shame.