Father and Daughter

Father and Daughter (Vader en Dochter, 2000) is an animated (9:22 minutes) short film directed and written by Dutch filmmaker Michael Dudok de Wit. The film uses a sober black/white and sepia coloured approach, using minimal lines, no facial expressions, touching silhouettes, minimal sound design, appropriate symbolism and no dialogue, as a means to tell an emotional and slightly magical realistic story of a young girl longing for the return of her missing father. There is no comparison to other animated shorts that evoke such devastating melancholy in such brief lenghts, while also withholding a joyous feel in how every aspect of the film is perfectly executed.

Canadian composer Normand Roger has written music to film for over hte last five decades, and often took the role of sound designer on these projects as well. As time passed, he began to form a small team of people, including musicians (Chartrand) with whom he collaborated to the music for Father and Daughter. The sparse sound design by Jean-Baptiste Roger, bird and bicyle sounds, is consistent to the sober stylistics of the animation. However, the music takes center stage, and is sober, melancholic and joyous when needed. As the seasons change, and the young girl ages, recurring longing of her father, are underscored by a (recurring) waltz disguised in different variations, nuances, presented in an interplay between accordion, piano, bassoon and minimal keyboard. It is based on The Danube Waves waltz, composed by Iosif Ivanovici, and is debatably somewhere in between very recognizable and substantially different; the result is outstanding. Similarly, in another one Dudok' short anmtated films - Le moine et le poisson,1994 - Serge Besset's interprets Corelli's La Follia, while a recording of Corelli' Concerti Grossi Op.6 , No 2 and 12 was used in The Aroma of Tea (2006)

The music to Father and Daughter is of great beauty, perhaps only suprassed by the Ghibli feature animated film La Tortue Rouge directed by de Wit, which features a mesmerizing real original score by Laurent Perez Del Mar.



(19-03-2025)