Through My Thick Glasses
2003 · 12m · Canada
Directed by Pjotr Sapegin
Genres: animation, comedy, war
Tones: darkly comic, theatrical, whimsical
While helping his granddaughter bundle up for winter, an elderly man spins an exaggerated clay-animated tale of his Second World War experiences full of odd characters and twists.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A war story told through clay animation to a granddaughter—it sounds like feel-good middlebrow comfort, but Sapegin's refusal to let the whimsy sanitize the horror, the way the exaggeration *deepens* rather than dodges the darkness, that's the subversion hiding in plain sight.
The nested frame—memory as performance, trauma as bedtime story—sits squarely in a lineage of formalist approaches to war cinema, and the decision to filter atrocity through clay and comedy without letting either undercut the other shows a curatorial intelligence about how animation can hold contradiction.
The single choice that carries this: using the granddaughter's presence as the emotional anchor while the old man's tale spirals into absurdist excess—that tonal constraint, that one stable point, is what prevents the whimsy from becoming glib and makes the whole 12 minutes breathe.