Netflix’s upcoming animated movie, “I Lost My Body,” an existential mystery about a severed hand, won the Grand Prize award at the third annual Animation Is Film Festival, held last weekend in Los Angeles. The movie had originally screened in a Cannes sidebar this past May, winning the Nespresso Grand Prize. I sadly missed the film when I was there, not for a lack of trying. I finally caught up with French director Jérémy Clapin’s film a few weeks ago. It’s an adult-oriented and boldly original movie that uses flashbacks to slowly reveal the reasons why its main character ends up in a tragic accident where his hand gets severed.
The hand ends up becoming a character of its own. Disembodied, it escapes from a medical lab’s refrigerator and spends the rest of the movie desperately trying to reunite with its owner. Wait until you see it try to fend off pigeons, rats and dogs to reunite with pizza-delivery boy Naoufel (Patel), who has fallen in love with librarian Gabrielle (Shawkat). This turns into a sweet-natured yet stalker-ish romance. Naoufel is painfully shy but decides to take a job as a carpenter’s apprentice just so that he can be in the vicinity of his crush, who happens to be the carpenter’s niece. The two had previously shared a sweet conversation via her building’s intercom after arriving 40 minutes late with her pizza, not seeing each other but connecting through voice only.
Clapin’s original use of animation here is second-to-none, and the near silent-film style used here is quite impressive. A small quip I may have with the film is how Naoufel’s misguided attempt at cruising Gabrielle all too ambiguously wraps up. It’s boldly visual storytelling, done in the most innovative ways imaginable. With two very different narratives unfolding simultaneously, Clapin doesn’t fully succeed in merging the two storylines together, if he had then this could have been a better movie, but the final 10 or so minutes do fall a bit flat.
And yet, is “I Lost My Body” a shoo-in to be nominated for a Best Animated Feature? Almost certainly. I can’t imagine the voting body bypassing this original animated statement from Clapin (which, before streaming on Netflix in a couple of weeks, will have a qualifying theatrical run November 15).
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