The Trout That Stole the Rainbow
1982 · 8m · Canada
Directed by Eva Szasz
Genres: animation, family, fantasy
In an animated fable, a trout so captivated by the rainbow's beauty steals it from the sky and drains the world of colour, in a story explaining how the rainbow trout got its name.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A cosmology-through-theft fable that's almost too tidy—the premise does the heavy lifting and the animation doesn't push back, which means it lands exactly where you expect it to, which is precisely the problem.
Szasz's economy of line and color creates a formally elegant origin myth that sits comfortably in the NFB's animated-fable tradition; the restraint in depicting loss—draining the world to grayscale—proves more devastating than spectacle ever could.
The decision to render the post-theft world in monochrome rather than a muted palette is quietly devastating and technically clever—it makes the trout's theft visceral and immediate in a way that costs nothing but changes everything about how you feel the consequence.