'The Night Boots' by Pierre-Luc Granjon (2024): Film Review - Annecy Festival
It took a small-looking, almost of children material, French animation short to win this year's Annecy Cristal for a Short Film. 'The Night Boots' (Les bottes de la nuit) by animation filmmaker Pierre-Luc Granjon (production: Am Stram Gram) tells the story of a child meeting a strange 'beast' in the woods -instead of a terrifying adventure, the curious but solitary beast leads Elliot to a world of nighttime wonder and wander.
This is not the first time that Granjon delves into childhood (and forest); his more raw 'The White Wolf' (Le loup blanc, 2007), a cutout film, investigates the consequences of being habituated to animal killing -even from a very young age. The topic is also addressed in this 12-minute pinscreen animation short, which starts with a dinner table discussion between Elliot's parents and their guests. The topic concerns human and animal co-existence, and human cruelty to animals is addressed here as a remnant of the past (to be judged negatively).
Yet, 'The Night Boots' does not have human and animal coexistence as its main milieu but rather confronts coexistence in general. We soon learn that Eliot "is a lonely boy"—and the main character, with ears that resemble a flat dish and hollow black eyes, will soon meet his match, another lonely monster half his size.
To say that loneliness is the central theme of 'The Night Boots' is another facile judgment. The film succeeds instead in transforming an otherwise heart-wrenching condition (being alone) into a journey of coexistence via the primary element of wonder. Joint and magical discovery is here the element of negotiation. And, as counterintuitive as it seems (for a journey that promises magical wonders) the pinscreen animation technique with its charcoal look still does the trick.
Characters are not squashed and stretched on screen, they simply evaporate and reappear, being closer and closer to each other. Even when they run (as Elliot does), the feeling is of stillness and a magical arrival at your destination. (For a comparison with a much shorter pinscreen effort, check Pierre-Luc Granjon's 2-minute film 'Le Chien' (The Dog, 2018), made as part of the Bois d'Arcy residency. The square film format, on the other hand, makes this night journey a focused and contained one; nothing is redundant in Granjon's 'The Night Boots'. All the animal encounters have their purpose: to teach about prejudice, misinformation, or simply the unexplained, which needs to be maintained as such and respected.
Of course, the film's center is the relationship between Elliot and the 'monster', the two outcasts; a classical trope which is here reinvented by what the other lacks: Elliot lacks experience, the monster lacks a family past -and the rubber boots are a way to connect the two.
Very short on out-and-front experimentation (but involving mysterious creatures nevertheless) and with an aesthetics that diffuses all unexpressed pain (including the cello and piano discreet melodies by Timothée Joly), 'The Night Boots' is an elegy of joint experiences and learning -and one that doesn't miss a beat in detailing the camaraderie of nature, from shadows to cloud-gobblers.
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