Tchou-tchou
1972 · 13m · Canada
Directed by Co Hoedeman
Genres: animation, family, fantasy
In a children's film told entirely with colourful building blocks, two children confront an angry dragon.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A children's film made entirely of building blocks confronting a dragon feels like it should be twee garbage, but Hoedeman's refusal to compromise the material's formal constraint—every frame built from the same vocabulary—turns constraint into subversion; the surrealism emerges not from narrative but from what the medium itself refuses to allow.
Tchou-tchou sits in a precise lineage of post-war experimental animation that treats abstraction as a children's birthright; Hoedeman's discipline with the block vocabulary and the considered pacing create a work that respects both the viewer's intelligence and animation's formal possibilities.
The decision to animate entirely in stacked, colorful blocks could flatten everything into novelty, but the editing—the way cuts between block-spaces create genuine spatial logic and tension during the dragon sequence—proves the constraint was the creative breakthrough.