The Procession

The scouts

The dead-wife-as-narrator thing could've been saccharine nonsense, but Blanchet and Saint-Gelais keep threading the needle between sentiment and subversion — there's something genuinely unsettling about Catherine's tenderness undercutting the funeral's social theatre, which most directors would botch completely.

A formally precise study in the grammar of grief: the dual perspective (Catherine's voiceover against Philip's silent endurance) recalls the elegiac tradition while the animation medium transforms a domestic tragedy into something approaching myth, with every compositional choice in service of that delicate tonal balance.

The decision to have Catherine speak while Philip remains wordless creates an almost unbearable asymmetry — she can comfort him across death's threshold, but he can't answer back — and that single structural choice does all the emotional work that lesser films need forty minutes to achieve.