Sea Dream
1979 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Ellen Besen
Genres: animation, family, fantasy
After a frustrating day, a young girl escapes into an underwater daydream where a lady octopus becomes her playmate. Their games restore her spirits before she returns to ordinary life feeling refreshed.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A girl has a dream about an octopus and feels better—it's the kind of anodyne fairy tale everyone's already made, and Besen doesn't seem interested in complicating or subverting the premise, just executing it competently.
Besen's 1979 animation positions itself squarely in the NFB tradition of humanist children's cinema, and the formal restraint—how the underwater sequences are rendered, the deliberate pacing between dream and waking—shows a filmmaker conscious of her lineage and committed to craft over sentimentality.
The specificity lies in how the octopus is animated as a genuine playmate rather than a mascot—there's a tactile, curious quality to her movements that suggests Besen made a decisive choice about personality over cuteness, and it's that single reorientation that makes the fantasy land somewhere real.