Rains
2008 · 7m · Canada
Directed by David Coquard-Dassault
Genres: animation, experimental
Tones: contemplative, whimsical
A brief cloudburst halts everyday movement across a city, leaving people stalled under shelters, struggling with umbrellas, or waiting out the weather alongside birds. Once skies clear, the pause dissolves and ordinary routines resume in this pencil-drawn animated short.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A seven-minute pause button on the city—clever, sure, but it's almost *too* polite about the disruption, content to let rain be poetic rather than actually weird it out and ask what a halt really means.
Coquard-Dassault's pencil animation sits squarely in the lineage of contemplative European shorts, and the formal choice to let a single weather event structure rhythm and observation—without narrative scaffolding—shows real restraint and curatorial confidence.
The decision to animate in pencil instead of digital gives the rain sequence a specific tactile softness that makes the pause feel permeable rather than total; it's the texture that does the philosophical work here.