Chicken for Linda!

Sébastien Laudenbach made The Girl Without Hands almost single-handedly in a brush-and-ink style with no outlines; Chiara Malta is an Italian documentarist. Together they took the Cristal at Annecy in 2023, the top prize in feature animation, for a film about a chicken.

Linda is accused of stealing her mother's ring. She did not. By way of apology Paulette offers to cook her anything she wants, and Linda asks for the chicken with peppers her father used to make before he died — a dish Paulette has never cooked and can barely remember. Then a general strike closes the country. The rest is a single hectic day of trying to obtain a live chicken by any means available, joined along the way by an entire tower block of children, a striking lorry driver and a policeman having a bad afternoon.

The animation assigns each character a single flat colour and dispenses with outlines almost entirely, so that a crowd scene becomes a moving abstract composition. It should not work at feature length; it does, because the drawing is doing emotional work — grief in this film is a colour that keeps recurring rather than a subject anybody discusses. Critics called it the most purely joyful European animation in years, and it is, while also being about a widow and her daughter learning how to talk about the man who is missing.