The Red Turtle

Michael Dudok de Wit had made three short films — one of them, Father and Daughter, an Academy Award winner — when Studio Ghibli approached him about a feature. The result is a French-Belgian-Japanese co-production, produced by Wild Bunch with Ghibli's involvement and Isao Takahata as artistic producer, and the only film Ghibli has co-produced with a European director.

A man survives a storm and washes up on an island with fresh water, bamboo and no other people. He tries to leave; something prevents him. There is no dialogue in the entire eighty-one minutes, only Laurent Perez del Mar's score and the sound of the island, and the drawing is deliberately spare — clean lines, watercolour backgrounds, no visible technique competing with the image.

It took the Un Certain Regard Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 2016 and an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature. What critics kept reaching for was the word 'fable', and the film earns it: a story about a life, told at the scale of tides and seasons, that manages to be genuinely moving without a single line of explanation. One of the very few animated features in the catalogue that works equally on adults and children, for entirely different reasons.