The Pool or Death of a Goldfish (2025): Film Review - Annecy Festival

Polish animation and live-action filmmaker Daria Kopiec has emerged as a careful observer of the family's dysfunctional dynamics. Whereas her previous animation short, 'Your Own Bullshit' was a singing, quirky lullaby of a a looped family relationship, the new animation short 'The Pool or Death of a Goldfish' (in competition at the 2025 Annecy Festival) tends to use water -instead of singing words or tapes- as its mode of silent expression.

Maria is a swimmer but is constantly hatched (like a goldfish) from the water by her parents, who'd rather have her literally chop her and eat her alive than listen to her own voice. A flashback and a small tomboy, Maria lives in a functional flat with a piano, with her mostly alone mother ready to offer anything but love. And the water keeps flowing.

Forbidden identity desires and their treatment are nothing new in animation and filmmaking, but the focus is always important. Here, the film focuses not on the content of the desires but is very particular on the mechanism of their suppression. And its scene sequence (after the harrowing first part) is admirably put to show a mechanism of prohibition that even its actors cannot fully comprehend. Both in closed and open spaces (playgrounds, for instance), an escape valve is nowhere to be found, which leads in turn to mildly fantasy scenes (the goldfish out of water).

Watch 'The Pool or Death of a Goldfish' trailer:

Kopiec balances the animation's medium capacity for excess and her theme's need for narrative discreetness. She uses her dialogue lines very carefully (and powerfully), as if there were weapons of destruction -or revolt. Her puppets, with their slight rouge cheeks and their pointed nose, are ready to combat (or step aside in the background). The film's interior spaces feature lighting that, in all manifestations, from day to night, acts as another intruder -not a wonder that the main character can only find solace in deep water. And the film's uneasy piano chords (music by Natalia Czekala) are left to give the delicate balance between being in reality or forever putting yourself in the desire limbo background.

A well-built and alluring film at the same time, 'The Pool or Death of a Goldfish' makes a strong point of the consequences of not being left to your own individual expression -and sums up concisely the despair and the anger within.

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