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 — making it the first French animated feature ever to receive the nomination. The film consolidated Clapin's transition from short-film director to feature-length animation, and was Netflix's first acquired animation feature.

Adapted by Clapin and Guillaume Laurant (Jean-Pierre Jeunet's regular collaborator) from Laurant's 2006 novel Happy Hand, the film unfolds across two interweaving timelines. In one, a severed hand escapes a Paris medical-laboratory specimen drawer and crawls across the city — through Métro tunnels, across rooftops, between traffic — in search of the body it belongs to. In the other, the young Moroccan-French man Naoufel (voice of Hakim Faris), to whom the hand once belonged, falls haltingly in love with a young librarian named Gabrielle (voice of Victoire Du Bois) over the course of an intercom-conversation pizza-delivery.

The film's animation register is a hybrid of hand-drawn 2D and motion-capture-supported 3D, in a register Clapin had refined across his earlier shorts. The score, by Dan Levy of The Dø, anchors the film's distinctive emotional tone. I Lost My Body is widely placed among the most-distinctive recent works of European adult animation.