The Head Vanishes

The Head Vanishes (2016)

Une tête disparaît

Jacqueline has lost her mind a bit, but whatever, for her trip to the seaside, she has decided to take the train by herself, like a big girl!

Date of release
2016-11-03
TMDB
6.5 / 10 (27)
Runtime
9m
Genres
Animation, Drama
Director
Franck Dion

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 0. Including: Annecy Cristal for a Short Film

The Head Vanishes is a 2016 Canada/France animated short by Franck Dion about a woman with dementia who is determined to make her annual train trip to the seaside.

Production

Co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada, Papy3D Productions and ARTE France, the film was partly inspired by Dion's experiences with his great-grandmother, with whom he was close and saw deteriorate mentally while he was a child. Dion began to work on the film in 2014, after deciding to depart from a feature-film project.

A key narrative element in the film is the central character literally "losing her head" on the train trip—again inspired by a true-life anecdote involving his ill grandmother, who had once asked Dion's mother to fetch her head from under the sink, believing that it had rolled under there. Dion decided to set the film on a train, with the film's title a reference to Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.

Dion used 3D models in order to communicate to his animators what he was looking for and emphasized economy of movement and simple, character-based gestures. Music was by composer Pierre Caillet, a frequent collaborator. Pierre Yves Drapeau did the sound design, with the idea of pigeon sounds to accompany the appearance of the central character's daughter suggested by Julie Roy, the film's NFB producer.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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