The presence of Michael Dudok de Wit in the 2016 Cannes film festival announcement prompted me to re-watch his 2000 film Father and Daughter, which won an Oscar in 2001 for Best Animated Short Film. You should definitely watch it if you have a spare 10 minutes:
It’s a beautiful film. The amount of story and feeling Dudok de Wit is able to express without dialogue, just through movement, music and sound effects, is really incredible.
It got me thinking about this week’s readings, and I realised that Father and Daughter has all the major elements that a cohesive film should have. There’s a three-act structure, a protagonist and an antagonist, and the success of the film relies on its ability to evoke empathy in its audience (which is does very well, at least in my case).
The protagonist is the daughter, as the whole story is told from her point of view narratively and emotionally. She undergoes the most change/development, as she grows from a little girl to an old woman, and has a conscious desire (for her father to return).
The antagonist is the father. This is interesting because the father is actually barely in the film at all, and he’s not an enemy in the traditional sense, but his character’s desires/behaviour lie in opposition to the daughter.
Act I sets up the characters (father, daughter) and the setting. Depending on how you read the film the inciting incident could be the birth of the daughter, or it could be the start of a war. There is a first-act turning point when the father gets into a boat and rows away, never to return. The film leaves it intentionally ambiguous, but this could be read literally (he abandoned the daughter) or metaphorically (rowing away could be a symbol for death, or for going off to war, or various other potential explanations).
In Act II we watch as the daughter goes through her life, growing older little by little, revisiting the many places she and her father visited on their bikes when she was younger. We see her go through her entire life, wondering about her father and the loss in her life.
Finally, in Act III we see the daughter, now an elderly woman herself, literally follow in her father’s footsteps as she steps out from the beach and finds his abandoned, decaying rowboat. Again, depending on your reading of the film the climax and resolution could actually mean different things, but they’re certainly present at the end of the film.
So it goes to show that even a poetic animated film with no dialogue can be read according to the principles of narrative and story laid out by McKee and Rabiger.