Pumpkins and Old Lace
2010 · 8m · Canada
Directed by Juliette Loubières
Genres: animation, comedy, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
A photographer searching a retirement home for an ideal elderly face to advertise adult diapers encounters residents whose stories complicate his assignment and reveal lives behind the wrinkles.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise is a genuine trap—you expect corporate satire about commodifying the elderly, and instead get something genuinely humane that refuses the easy cynicism. Loubières commits to the bait-and-switch so completely that by the end you're not sure if she fooled you or if you fooled yourself.
The film sits confidently in a lineage of humanist animation that values observation over spectacle, recalling the formal restraint of Michaël Dudok de Wit while maintaining its own tonal discipline—each resident's moment of revelation is precisely calibrated to avoid sentimentality.
The singular choice here is the decision to keep the photographer's face obscured and his voice flat throughout; it lets the residents' animated expressions and vocal performances breathe without competition, and transforms what could've been a 'learning lesson' narrative into something genuinely about witness and attention.