The King of the Wetland
2017 · 8m · Canada
Directed by André Desrochers
A Dundee storyteller, Mister Lapierre, offers a tall tale explaining how the muskrat got its tail, set alongside a legend about how each animal received its own.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Tall tales about animal origins sound like the most predictable premise imaginable, but Desrochers threads something genuinely odd through the folklore—a Dundee storyteller reshaping creation myth in real time, which is either clever metanarrative or a genre trap, and I'm genuinely unsure which.
The film operates as a formal study in nested narrative and oral tradition, positioning the storyteller as both subject and frame—a structure that echoes centuries of folklore cinema while maintaining the discipline to let image and voice cohere around a single mythic impulse.
What anchors this is Desrochers' decision to let the storyteller's performance *be* the animation, the voice and body the only constant as the world of the tale shifts around him—that single commitment to embodied narration is what makes eight minutes of animal legend feel earned rather than whimsical.