The Trenches
2010 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Claude Cloutier
Genres: animation, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
On a First World War battlefield, Canadian recruits dread the attack order; when it comes, a young soldier leaps into fire and blood where the earth swallows living and dead alike, in a pictorial indictment of war's futility.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a canonical anti-war film doing exactly what anti-war films do—which is precisely why it doesn't surprise me, even if Cloutier's commitment to the trench as a visual metaphor for mechanical death is unflinching enough to almost earn the obviousness.
Cloutier positions this work squarely within the lineage of war animation stretching back through Fischinger and into the documentary impulse; the pictorial language—earth consuming both combatant and corpse—recalls both German Expressionism and the National Film Board's commitment to moral witness, all executed with a formal restraint that respects the gravity of its subject.
The choice to animate rather than live-act the trenches buys Cloutier something essential: the earth itself becomes a character, a consuming force rendered through texture and movement that live action could only approximate, and that single formal decision transforms what could have been didactic into something genuinely haunting.