The Sky Is Blue
1969 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Rick Raxlen
Genres: animation, family, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
A boy rides upward on a kite tail in a wordless paper cut-out fantasy, drifting past birds, aircraft, stars and a spaceship before gently returning to where his sky journey began.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1969 paper-cut dream about a boy on a kite sounds like Hallmark Channel pablum, but Raxlen's refusal to land anywhere—no narrative, no moral, just drift—turns sentimentality into genuine strangeness; it's boring in exactly the way that breaks the boredom.
Raxlen's economy of form—paper cutouts, minimal color, a four-minute arc that echoes both Miyazaki's later sensibilities and a lineage of poetic animation from the NFB tradition—demonstrates how restraint becomes its own eloquence; this is craft that knows what it inherits.
The single decision that makes this work is the soundscape; without dialogue or heavy score, the ambient hum and subtle wind become the film's architecture, letting each cut of the kite tail and each drift past a star do the emotional work that dialogue would ruin.