When the Day Breaks
1999 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Wendy Tilby, Amanda Forbis
Genres: animation, comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
Ruby, a pig living in the city, witnesses a stranger's accidental death and spends the day quietly searching for reassurance. In this animated short featuring Martha Wainwright's singing, small encounters reveal the fragile connections that link urban lives at the start of a new day.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A dead stranger and a pig mourning in the city should be a weird provocation, but instead it's almost... gentle? The film keeps undercutting its own morbid premise with whimsy, which feels like a missed opportunity to actually commit to something genuinely strange.
Tilby and Forbis situate this firmly in the lineage of humanist animation—Wainwright's voice, the delicate watercolor palette, the structural restraint—each element in conversation with a tradition of tender metropolitan portraiture. The formal precision here rewards close viewing: how much is said through negative space and timing rather than plot.
The decision to center an animal witness rather than a human one fundamentally reframes the entire emotional register—suddenly grief becomes observation, and Martha Wainwright's vocal performance becomes the connective tissue binding strangers together, doing narrative work that the animation alone couldn't carry.