The Giant
1987 · 2m · Canada
Directed by Denis Nokony
Genres: animation, biography, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Édouard Beaupré, the 2.5-metre Willow Bunch Giant and tallest Canadian in history, is remembered from his 1881 Métis birth near Moose Jaw to his death at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. The two-minute animation tells his brief life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A two-minute biography of a circus oddity should be disposable, but Nokony refuses the freak-show angle and instead builds something genuinely unsettling about erasure and spectacle—the Giant gets memorialized but never quite seen.
Nokony's restraint is the whole film: animation as elegy, compressing a life of exploitation into two minutes that feel aware of every frame's weight, sitting squarely in the lineage of National Film Board humanist practice.
The choice to animate rather than archive this history—to rebuild Beaupré's body and presence through line and motion instead of photographs—transforms a historical footnote into an act of aesthetic recovery that feels earned in every stroke.