Last year's most amazing animation came from a little-known French director, Jérémy Clapin. This "I Lost My Body" is his directorial debut, and the screenwriter and original author Guillaume Laurant has written It has appeared in "Amelie" and "Alien 4", which can explain the bloody horror pictures and creative plots in the works. Rarely have I encountered a non-American animation with such magic, and I couldn't take my eyes off it from beginning to end, first of all thanks to the director's narrative style. This kind of handling of characters and time and space has a lot of Nolan flavor. First, it describes a severed hand that escaped from a hospital laboratory and ventured around Paris to find his master's body. At the same time, the plot of another Moroccan boy is launched, which tells that he lived in Paris after the death of his parents, worked as a pizza deliveryman, fell in love with a local girl and was rejected, and then the most crucial episode of breaking his hand appeared. Since then, the two plot threads have come together. The narrative alternates between past and present, with clips of the boy reminiscing about his childhood, giving the story a quirky delight.
After a lot of hardships, the broken hand finally returned to the protagonist. However, the story did not end there, and the severed hand did not "reunite" with the protagonist. This somewhat unexpected handling makes the film not stop at the thriller and suspense type pattern created in the first half, but highlights the deep theme. From the severed hand's point of view, it lost its master's body, and on the protagonist boy's side, he seemed to have lost more: his parents, his job, and the last straw that broke him: love. The open-ended ending leaves a lot to be desired: what the boy's future will hold, perhaps only he himself knows. The film expresses sentimental thinking around the unavoidable "loss" theme in life, and occasionally wraps up some social topics, such as immigration and class issues, and does not completely indulge in an overly small and fresh pattern.
What surprised me the most is the animation style. Although the characters speak fluent French to each other, the shape and style of painting are more like the taste of East Asian comics. The main line of emotional context of the characters is also inclined to a more subtle oriental expression, but from time to time it is accompanied by a clear European philosophical thinking. Therefore, this cartoon is like a monster with two heads, crawling forward in the expression of the two cultural contexts of the East and the West, and after losing the body and emotion, it pursues the ultimate meaning of human existence and loneliness.
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