Dimanche (Sunday)

Patrick Doyon's Dimanche (Sunday) was one of the Best Animated Short nominees for the 2012 Academy Awards, but despite its modest charm, it's hardly outstanding. The story is extremely simple: after a bored young boy's imagination runs riot during a church service, he travels with his parents to his grandparents' house, where a gaggle of family members and friends soon arrive. While everyone chatters away unintelligibly—a favorite device of the director is to juxtapose their talk with the cawing crows outside—the youngster daydreams about a hunting trophy on the wall coming to life and colliding with a passing train. Presumably the anecdote is intended as a celebration of a child's power to engage in flights of fancy, but Doyon's treatment is disappointingly mundane. The animation is drab, while the intrusive music and sound effects only make the strained sense of whimsy seem all the more desperate. Granted, there's a subtext here about the different generations' views of money—the adults worry about the closure of the town factory, while the child discovers that a coin can have magical powers—but Dimanche never truly develops any magic of its own. Not a necessary purchase. Aud: P. (F. Swietek)