Snowflakes
2022 · 6m · USA
Directed by Sabrina Stoll
Genres: animation, drama, family
Tones: melancholic, tender, whimsical
In a children's hospital, a five-year-old cancer patient named Charly rediscovers joy and imagination when a new friend makes it magically snow indoors. Made in partnership with Make-A-Wish foundations across the US, Germany, and Switzerland, featuring real children with medical conditions as voice cast.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
I'm not usually moved by hospital-set animation, but weaponizing actual sick kids as voice actors to narrate their own illness flips the schmaltz into something genuinely unsettling and strange.
Sabrina Stoll voice-cast real cancer patients and transplant recipients as the children — the documentary collapse inside the animation is the move, and it earns its tender register without cloying.
Animation with real pediatric cancer patients as voice cast collapses documentary subject and animated character — that's an ethically interesting move, though Make-A-Wish partnerships also tend toward the saccharine. Six minutes contains the risk either way.