“Death does not exist” review: Animation follows young activists in the battle | Reviews

DIR/SCR: Felix Dufour raprier. Canada/France. 2025. 72 minutes

The tension between social responsibility and personal preservation is the focus of this Canadian French animation, the expressive hand-drawn graphics help to bring depth and influence on a somewhat illuminating narrative. Concentrated Death does not exist Use his dreamlike tone to achieve sharp real points about the potential strength and the undeniable restrictions and individual action.

The carefully hand -drawn animation has a hallucinogenic quality

Author/director Felix Dufour-Raperrier won the Annecy Contrechamps jury Award in 2021 with his third feature archipelagoand follow-up Death does not exist will also play in the competition at the animation festival after making his debut from Cannes Directors in the fourteen days. (The film was presented in Annecy's work at work in 2024.) Further festival games are likely and the UFO distribution is published in France and Maison 4: 3 in Canada. The film can be distinguishable further away to arouse the interest of socially conscious dealers who are interested in animations with mature topics.

At the center of history is Hélène (expressed by Zeneb Blanchet), a member of a small group of angry young activists who plan to “figures of the establishment”. Their idealistic hope is that the shock waves from the event will lead a more fair, more balanced world order. “Everything it needs is a bit of courage,” explains the group leader Manon (Karelle Tremblay). “Everything will collapse.” This feeling is literally rendered by Dufour raprier as a marauding tidal wave-wave-ear-earmque, which devours the opulent home and its surroundings and settles new properties on which the next generation can rebuild.

But when the moment of the action comes-an orgy of violence that moments of visceral beauty in the middle of the slaughter-is paralyzed by fear, and her friends, including potential lovers Marc (Mattis Savard-Verhoeven), are killed. Hélène escapes into the forest and may have wounded herself where she is haunted by Manon, who tells her that she now has a second chance. In this dark night of the soul, Hélène has to decide whether they should stand up for their friends and their beliefs or run themselves and save themselves.

Despite a short runtime, Dufour-Raperrier's script can feel stretched-Hélène and Manon spend a lot of time to hike through the forest and come across a young girl who may be a younger version of Hélène or not who is involved in discussions about Loyaly, responsibility and fear. The dialogue has a lot of repetition, perhaps intentionally of the quasi-dreamstate, in which the campaign takes place or dies or dies or both? – But sometimes it feels like you are hammering home.

However, the approach of Dafour-raprier is visually more nuanced and fascinating. The carefully hand -drawn two -dimensional animation, the simple appearance of which contradicts a wealth of details, has a hallucinogenic quality. He uses a steamed palette with color dups, and while Hélène takes on the solid colors of their surroundings, Manon and Marc appear as an etheric outline and blur the border between the character and background.

Elsewhere, the structural natural beauty of the forest with its abundant flora and fauna with the well -groomed handicrafts of the house of the target family and shows exactly what Hélène, Manon – and in a broader sense – fight. Similarly, music is observed by Olivier Calvert and Samuel Gagnon-Thibaugeau and an evocative natural sound landscape is summarized, into which calls, shots, shots and occasionally electronic tones penetrate occasionally.