The Street
1976 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Caroline Leaf
Genres: animation, drama, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Adapted from a Mordecai Richler story in watercolour and ink washes, a family confronts its feelings and harsh responses as a grandmother lies dying.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to canonize Leaf's watercolour restraint, but what actually gets me is how she weaponizes sentimentality—the medium becomes the opposite of precious, it's almost hostile in its refusal to dramatize the dying. She's bored you with deathbed scenes; she'll bore you again, but meaner.
Leaf's adaptation of Richler sits squarely in the lineage of literary animation that understands the page as constraint rather than limitation; the watercolour wash becomes formal argument about intimacy and erasure, each brushstroke a deliberate decision about what cinema can do that prose cannot.
The choice to animate in watercolour ink washes instead of cel or digital—it's not nostalgia, it's the entire film's nerve system: every dissolve, every pooling edge reads as emotional temperature, and Leaf makes a $0 budget decision do the work of a thousand-dollar production design choice.