This is another of those strong European animated films for adults, and seems to be the directorial debut of its maker Jérémy Clapin. It has a macabre premise about a disembodied hand and uses it brilliantly to make a powerful point. However I’m not sure that I can agree with the particular philosophy of life that it espouses, thus I ended up not liking as much as many critiques seem to have.

A hand severed from the rest of the body lies inside a refrigerator. When the door is opened, it makes its escape, sneaking out the window into the city. After it learns to move properly, it embarks on a journey to rejoin its owner, facing multiple dangers along the way. Meanwhile a series of flashbacks recount the story of the hand’s owner. Naoufel is a boy who grew up in Morocco who variably aspires to be a pianist and an astronaut, and has the habit of going around recording sounds with a portable tape recorder. However at one point he loses his parents and is forced to go live in France with distant family members who don’t care much for him. One evening while working as a pizza deliverer, he strikes up a conversation with a woman through her building’s intercom and becomes infatuated. He stalks her, learning where she works and that she has an uncle who is a carpenter. He talks his way into being accepted as an apprentice and thus learns the trade while befriending the girl Gabrielle.

You may think that you’ve watched animated films about small objects making an epic journey before but the peril and abuse that this disembodied hand faces as it tries to rejoin its owner is like nothing else. Being a ordinary human hand, it bleeds and is in constant danger of being cut up as it must contend with rats and environmental hazards. As it makes it way down an escalator, we can’t help but cringe, imagining how easily it could get caught up in the gears. But worst of all is that as the two separate stories of the hand and Naoufel progress, we can see far in advance that the stories will culminate in the traumatic event that causes the hand to be severed. As we watch Naoufel get the job as a carpenter’s apprentice and learn how to saw wood, we even get an inkling of what is going to happen and the sense of dread is enough to make you want to cover your eyes with your hands. On an emotional level, this film is superb, making full use of the vulnerability of this lonely hand to get us to connect with the story of its owner Naoufel.

The underlying theme here is of course loss and moving past it. Naoufel suffers from multiple setbacks, each of which throw his life wildly off-course. The lesson is the familiar one that no matter how bad things get, one should never give up and that it is always possible to bounce back. Yet there is such a thing as being too reckless in the pursuit of one’s dreams and I dislike the usual exhortation to hold absolutely nothing back in life. The film even goes out of its way to how accident-prone Naoufel is but does it say that maybe he ought to be a little more careful? Nope, absolutely not because that would be giving in. Naoufel instant infatuation with Gabrielle and how he stalks her is perhaps another manifestation of that. I do like that she shoots him down because that is just being creepy but he does seem to win her over in the end with his unrelenting positivity.

As I’ve noted before, this kind of never give up spirit recurs often in Japanese animation as well and it certainly makes for a powerful form of artistic expression. But I think there is also something to be said in being changed by traumatic experiences and consciously accepting lessons drawn from it, and that point is underserved in art. In any case, this is a good film and I would recommend it but it’s not something that personally resonates with me.