The Tooth
2017 · 3m · Canada
Directed by Guy Delisle
Genres: animation, comedy, family
Tones: humorous, tender, whimsical
A father struggles through breakfast conversations to invent excuses for why the tooth fairy failed to visit his young son after the boy lost a tooth.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a premise that sounds like every greeting-card dad joke ever made, which is exactly why most scouts would sleep on it—but Delisle somehow makes the tooth fairy's absence genuinely unsettling, turning parental white lies into something darker and more interesting than the setup deserves.
A deceptively simple structure that recalls the fractured-breakfast-table tradition of films like *Moonlight* or *Tokyo Story*, where animation's formal control lets Delisle compress emotional weight into three minutes of carefully observed parental fumbling.
The decision to animate the father's increasingly desperate improvisations rather than showing the boy's reactions is what makes this work—we're trapped in the parent's spiraling anxiety, and that single formal choice transforms a one-line premise into something genuinely tender and specific.