Romance
2011 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Georges Schwizgebel
Genres: animation, fantasy, romance
Tones: surreal, tender, whimsical
Aboard an airplane, a traveller slips into an animated dream shaped by desire and Rachmaninoff's music, where an imagined love story swirls between fantasy and waking reality.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Schwizgebel wraps a pretty conventional love-in-the-clouds premise in so much formal virtuosity that it almost disappears—which is kind of the point, and kind of boring once you realize there's nothing underneath the technique.
A masterclass in using animation's freedom to literalize the space between desire and reality; Schwizgebel's restraint with Rachmaninoff and his deliberate pacing position this squarely in the lineage of introspective experimental animation that prizes suggestion over spectacle.
The decision to let the Rachmaninoff dictate the pacing and emotional architecture rather than the other way around is what transforms this from a nice dream sequence into something that actually breathes—every cut lands because the music earned it first.