Riverdale Lion
1979 · 1m · Canada
Genres: animation, essay film
Tones: contemplative, whimsical
Animated images interpret John Robert Colombo's poem about a lion in Riverdale.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A one-minute poem-to-animation adapter from 1979 sounds like the safest possible film school exercise, but there's something genuinely odd about treating Colombo's domesticated lion as a meditation object—it refuses to perform and just *sits* there, which is either boring or brilliantly deadpan depending on your tolerance for anti-climax.
A restrained essay film that honors its source material through formal constraint rather than illustration; the animation's refusal to overdetermine Colombo's language places it squarely in the tradition of the literary short, where the image serves contemplation rather than narrative.
The decision to animate sparsely and let the poem do most of the heavy lifting exposes how much craft goes into knowing when *not* to fill the frame—a one-minute film that proves restraint is a technical choice, not a limitation.