The old lion and the little cat
2021 · 6m · France
Directed by Violeta Cortes
Genres: animation, family, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Death gives a dying old lion three days to say goodbye to his little cat — he uses it to build him a safe home.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects this premise to be maudlin—Death as a greeting card, a lion saying goodbye in soft watercolors—but Cortes resists the obvious sentiment entirely and lets the work of *building* become the goodbye, which is genuinely unsettling in the best way.
The film understands itself as sitting in a lineage of animated fables that treat mortality with formal dignity; the restraint in the color palette and pacing choices feels descended from European art cinema, refusing the emotional manipulation that lesser studios would inflict on this material.
The decision to make the three days about construction—physical, deliberate work—rather than conversation or reminiscence is what saves this from sentiment; it's a single narrative choice that transforms what could be treacly into something genuinely moving.