The Day Is Listening
2013 · 8m · Canada
Directed by Félix Dufour-Laperrière
Genres: animation, experimental, romance
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A man and a woman whose love rivals their devotion to literature move through cycles of longing and desire, set to the poetry of Hélène Dorion.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A romance told through the prism of literary obsession should feel contrarian enough, but Dufour-Laperrière plays it too reverently—the animation genuflects to Dorion's poetry instead of wrestling with it, which means the real subversion never arrives.
This is precisely the kind of formally considered work that understands its debts: an animated love letter that situates itself in a lineage of poetic cinema while demonstrating real rigor in how image and verse build meaning together across eight deliberate minutes.
The choice to let the animation breathe in negative space around the poetry—to animate absence and longing rather than illustration—is the decision that elevates this from a nice literary adaptation into something genuinely singular.