ABSTRACT
Dudok de Wit’s most famous short animated film Father and Daughter (2000) won all possible international awards, including the Academy Award for the Best animated short film in 2001. Due to serious financial difficulties, the filmmaker finished it only after four years of discontinued production. The storyline is about a lifelong waiting and longing of a daughter for her absent father who left when she was little and who never came back. Drawn in chiaroscuro charcoal technique, Father and Daughter is situated in the Dutch landscape of an imagined infinite polder that changes along with the main protagonist throughout the years. The film was done using a combination of analogue and digital media, and the apparently simple score, composed by Normand Roger, with its variations adapted itself to the simplicity of Dudok de Wit’s visual language resulting in a powerful synesthesia – wistful visuals and auditory stimuli accompanied a spectator to the heart of daughter’s yearning, relieved in the climax scene of the final reunion.
