Translated to ‘The Joy of Living’, the animated French short is about two girls who ballads their way through power plants, forests and train stations. When they interrupt a man, presumably a worker at the power plants, he chases them to no ends. The animation is made by the pair Anthony Gross and Hector Hoppin.

While the premise sounds bewildering and perhaps silly, the execution actually makes the plot more mystical, and a sense of disbelief is obvious: the girls fly and get electrocuted while remaining fine, for example. It’s all whimsical and dream-like because the short follows one song in the entirety of 10 minutes – perhaps like a musical without words, or an inspired work of the early animations of Silly Symphonies – and without the fantastic music the short wouldn’t had worked. The song creates memorable tunes which are illustrated several times throughout, while adding layers and modifications to the soundtracks. There’s a very lovely structure to the song that begins very jubilant yet up-beat, then to stages of fear and danger, then to a much more fantasia-like ballet and so on. It’s clear, distinctive and really leads the direction of the plot while maintaining a weird atmosphere of the girls’ imaginary portrayal of their world versus the man’s threat.

But enough about the soundtrack, the animation is gorgeous. 1934 was barely peaking the golden age of animation but the use of animated perspective and moving backgrounds from the beginning, to the complex, rhythmical and fun dancing of the characters, with lots of fine details such as their sync and off-sync moments, trips and expressions, and especially with the slow dancing around 1:20 and 1:50 where the animation approaches the actions with a sense of gracefulness, is always fascinating to watch. The short isn’t particularly accurate in terms of proportions and how they move sometimes, like the man bends his back so far back or the pace of the characters seem impossible, but there’s also a certain rhythm that they choose in each scene and it responds really well to the soundtrack. I think the strange and exotic proportions of the designs work well in a whimsical atmosphere where a chase scene is portrayed as ‘nearly beautiful but one thing seems out of place’, and I love how it doesn’t choose one route, which gives the whole film a distinctive look and style.

If you can forgive the weird gender agendas and studies towards the end (it was 1930s mind), then I think it’s a wonderful watch. I really love it. It’s graceful, charming and just really interesting in its method of story telling and atmosphere, in a sense where you’re not actually given much details about the characters in backstory, but rather their actions and their interactions with both each other and the scenes around them.

Give it a watch here: