Sunday
2011 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Patrick Doyon
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
On a grey Sunday after mass, a boy bored by his family's anxious gathering at his grandparents' house, overshadowed by a factory closure, drops a coin on train tracks and finds it amazingly transformed after a train passes.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A kid drops a coin on train tracks and it gets shiny—sure, fine, but Doyon's made something that *resists* the magical-realism eye-roll by treating the transformation as genuinely minor, almost accidental wonder in the middle of economic collapse. The real subversion is that nothing huge happens, and somehow that's enough.
Doyon's animation sits comfortably in the lineage of intimate, observational European shorts—there's a formal precision to how he frames the family gathering's quiet anxiety and lets the coin moment breathe as counterpoint, a small gesture that recalls the tonal restraint of mid-century art cinema.
The decision to animate the coin's surface transformation in that specific metallic detail—catching light in a way that feels physically plausible rather than overtly fantastical—is what makes the whole short work; it's the hinge between a bored kid's mundane Sunday and something that actually moves him, done with maybe three frames of flourish.