Marona's Fantastic Tale

Anca Damian is a Romanian director who works between Bucharest, Brussels and Paris, and who has spent her career making animation for adults on budgets that would not cover a week of a studio production. Marona's Fantastic Tale is her most widely seen film, nominated for the European Film Award for Best Animated Feature and designed by the Belgian artist Brecht Evens.

The narrator is a dog, lying injured on a road, recounting the lives she has passed through. Each owner gets a different visual language: an acrobat's world is drawn in circus geometry and elastic limbs, a construction worker's in girders and heavy blocks, a small girl's in scribbled crayon. Evens's watercolour palette runs hot and translucent, backgrounds dissolve mid-scene, and characters are built from whatever shapes their owner's temperament suggests. It is one of the few animated features of the last decade in which the design is genuinely doing the storytelling rather than decorating it.

Critics compared it to Bill Plympton and to the illustrated children's books it plainly comes out of, and warned — accurately — that the family audience it looks made for will find it tougher than expected. It is a film about being loved conditionally and renamed by every person who claims you, told without a shred of sentimentality, and it is among the most beautiful pieces of European animation of its decade.