Raven's Feather Dance - A Creation Legend
1990 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Eva Szasz
Genres: animation, fantasy, musical
Tones: mythic, theatrical, whimsical
After a cosmic catastrophe erases humanity, Raven asks fellow animals for help restoring people to the world. Working with Coyote through music and ceremony, Raven repopulates Earth, then must prevent the newly revived crowd from descending into conflict.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A mythic creation story told through animation and ceremony — which sounds like consensus catnip, except Szasz threads something genuinely weird through it: Raven and Coyote as co-creators, and then the real conflict isn't good vs. evil but the messy friction of newly alive humans. That's the subversion hiding in plain sight.
Szasz positions this squarely in the lineage of animated folklore cinema — the NFB's own tradition of visual storytelling rooted in Indigenous narratives — while the theatrical musical framework and deliberate pacing suggest real formal consideration about how ceremony translates to screen. It's the kind of short that understands its own cultural and aesthetic genealogy.
The decision to make the restoration sequence itself musical — letting Raven and Coyote's actions *become* the score rather than overlay it — is what transforms a modest premise into something that feels ceremonial rather than illustrative, doing the heavy lifting of emotional weight on a nine-minute budget.