23/24
In times of war, a poor lumberjack and his wife live in a large forest. One day, the woman finds and saves a little girl, bringing an irrevocable change to the lives of the couple and those whose paths the child crosses. This is Michel Hazanavicius's first animated film.. This is the best film of 2024 that I have seen this year, and we are in mid-December 2024. It tells a story that takes place in Poland during World War II, almost like a popular film story. Most of the action takes place in the forest, so typical of the aforementioned popular stories, revolving around a pair of lumberjacks who adopt a Jewish girl thrown from a deportation train that passed through their forest. She was abandoned by her father to save her from certain death in Auschwitz. I will not go into the details of the plot so that you can see for yourself, I will only add that the film reaches a deeply philosophical conclusion. Technically, everything is also done perfectly. The visuals of the film are excellent. The cartoon style is dark, not too detailed or too harsh, mostly depicting scenes in low light with dominant shades of gray, emphasizing the horrors of the most infamous war and mass murder in human history. And then the soundtrack, which is sublime: The musical score, the sound effects, the narration and the voice acting (I saw the original version in French), all perfectly suited to presenting this gem of a film. In conclusion, it can be said that this is one of the best films that deals with the theme of racism and especially the Shoah through its artistic approach and the story it wants to tell.