The Man Who Stole Dreams
1987 · 11m · Canada
Directed by Joyce Borenstein
Genres: animation, family, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
A man steals the dreams of villagers and tries to sell them back, until a young girl named Sarah alerts the townsfolk and helps them reclaim what was taken.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A straight-faced fable about dream commerce that plays it safe—the premise *should* be weird enough to interrogate desire and value, but instead it lands as a children's morality play about greed. Give me the version where the dreams are actually worth stealing.
Borenstein's animation carries the formal precision of classic NFB lineage, and the film's architecture—theft, conspiracy, collective awakening—echoes fairy tale tradition while maintaining genuine contemplative depth; the tender restraint with which Sarah's agency unfolds feels earned within that formal grammar.
The decision to render dreams as something visually *austere* rather than trippy or ornate is what makes this work—the animation's refusal to visually spectacularize the stolen goods forces the emotional weight onto the human stakes, and that restraint is what lifts a familiar premise into something that actually lands.