The Hoarder
1969 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Evelyn Lambart
Genres: animation, comedy, family
A greedy blue jay hoards berries, eggs and even the sun in a secret stash, until he learns the value of sharing with friends.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A blue jay hoarding the sun sounds deliriously weird on paper, but Lambart plays it totally straight—which is either genius restraint or the safest swing at surrealism ever made; I'm genuinely unsure, and that ambiguity is the only thing keeping me interested.
Lambart's command of UPA-era graphic animation and her compositional economy place this squarely in the postwar modernist tradition of Norman McLaren's school, where formal elegance and moral clarity move in perfect sync—a masterclass in how restraint becomes eloquence.
The decision to animate the *theft* of sunlight as a physical act—stealing it into a jar, hoarding it like berries—is the architectural hinge that makes the whole fable work; everything else follows from that one visual metaphor.