The Wanderer
1988 · 11m · Canada
Directed by George Ungar
Genres: animation, fantasy, horror
In this animated adaptation of a Michel Tremblay story, a sinister stranger with supernatural powers arrives in a quiet village and unleashes greed and violence that turn it into a nightmare.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1988 Quebecois animated horror that adapts Tremblay like a fever dream—genuinely unsettling without jumping through the usual genre hoops, which means most people will sleep on it and miss the actual strange thing happening.
Ungar's restraint in the animation itself becomes the formal rigor here; the surreal mythic register recalls a lineage from UPA through European art animation, and the way the film resists spectacle in service of moral corruption feels deliberately, architecturally constructed.
The decision to animate this as something between storybook illustration and nightmare—flat, textured, almost naive—makes the creeping dread land harder than any slick rendering could; that tonal restraint is doing all the heavy lifting on a modest animation budget.