The Cinematheque

“Fabulous … This eye-catching, dimension-traveling adventure might be aimed at kids, but there’s plenty here for adults who grew up believing the possibilities of animation might be endless.”

Damon Wise, Deadline

This new and slightly surreal tale from directing-writing duo Benoît Chieux and Alain Gagnol (A Cat in Paris) is a hand-drawn wonder over ten years in the making! Young sisters Juliette, five, and Carmen, eight, are left in the care of their mother’s novelist friend Agnès for the weekend, a plan that starts to tilt off axis when Agnès, having completed an all-nighter for the latest entry in her fantasy book series, leaves Juliette and Carmen to their own devices. The two girls, naturally, slip into Agnès’s dreamworld across two consecutive stories, which mix stormy, colourful fantasias with the narrativized pangs of adulthood and its regrets. Chieux’s stunning animation style—completely two-dimensional—is clearly indebted to the masterworks of Paul Grimault (The King and the Mockingbird) and Miyazaki Hayao (Howl’s Moving Castle), but there is also room for inventions, including a mysterious songbird and an assortment of wonderland transformations.

English dubbed version

Audience Award
Annecy Animation Festival 2023

“Benoît Chieux has crafted—against considerable odds—a truly spectacular psychedelic excursion in the vein of head-trip classics Fantastic Planet and Yellow Submarine.”

Peter Debruge, Variety