Competing for ’ top prize, deploys animation to tell a semi-contemporary fairy tale about a lost baby girl who is thrown from a train bound for Auschwitz and found in the snow by a childless woodcutter’s wife. It’s the latest feature by French filmmaker , who’s been a favorite of the Cannes programmers ever since his cinephile- and crowd-pleasing serio-comic pastiche (2011) broke him onto the international stage, going on to scoop up awards — including a best picture Oscar — and box-office records (for a near-silent film, at least) worldwide. Sadly, Hazanavicius’ subsequent films haven’t enjoyed the same success.
This latest effort, however, might just be his most commercially viable in a while since Holocaust films nearly always travel. Its portability is only enhanced by it being animated, making it easy to dub this for different territories. If nothing else, will surely live on as a pedagogical tool in schools, able to show kids the horrors of the Holocaust but in an easier-to-digest, less visually traumatic cartoon form — and with a far briefer running time than, say, Claude Lanzmann’s 566-min documentary .
Examined strictly on aesthetic terms, without reference to any broader context, is a disappointment, mawkish and excessively manipulative, thanks especially to Alexandre Desplat’s syrupy score. The original novel on which it’s based, by eminent French dramatist and writer Jean-Claude Grumberg, may be more effective, but Hazanavicius’ adaptatio.