I Lost My Body

Jérémy Clapin's I Lost My Body (J'ai perdu mon corps) won the Grand Prize at Cannes Critics' Week in 2019 and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2020, the first French animated feature ever to receive that nomination. It marked Clapin's move from short films to feature-length animation, and it was the first animated feature Netflix acquired.

Clapin and Guillaume Laurant (Jean-Pierre Jeunet's regular collaborator) adapted it from Laurant's 2006 novel Happy Hand, and it runs on two interwoven timelines. In one, a severed hand escapes from a specimen drawer in a Paris medical laboratory and crawls across the city, through Métro tunnels, over rooftops and between traffic, looking for the body it belongs to. In the other, Naoufel (voiced by Hakim Faris), the young Moroccan-French man it once belonged to, falls haltingly in love with a young librarian named Gabrielle (voiced by Victoire Du Bois) after talking to her over an intercom while delivering her pizza.

The animation is a hybrid of hand-drawn 2D and motion-capture-assisted 3D, a technique Clapin had refined across his earlier shorts. Dan Levy of The Dø wrote the score, which does much to set the film's particular emotional tone. I Lost My Body is one of the most distinctive recent works of European adult animation, and among the most moving.