Please excuse our lateness of this review! We are covering every Academy Award nominee of 2020, so we’re cleaning up the films we forgot to critique earlier.

Occasionally, the Academy Awards can leave some of its finest trinkets in a specific category: Best Animated Feature. It’s strange, but the same Academy that selects The Boss Baby and Ferdinand in one year will go on and stake out The Red Turtle and The Boy and the World in other years. When the Academy isn’t fawning over run-of-the-mill regurgitation, it’s praising the hidden jewels of world cinema that could have easily been neglected. This is why I stick around for the Academy Awards, when it is so problematic in other ways. Occasionally, it gives deserving, overlooked works the time of day.

One of those happens to be the mesmerizing I Lost My Body: an adult cautionary tale in the form of a near-psychedelic experience. You spend enough time in the doldrums here to know that lead character Naoufel is severely depressed. His days as a lousy pizza deliveryman are juxtaposed with another storyline: a severed hand with a mind of its own trying to find its original host body. You can quickly decipher that this is Naoufel’s hand (the birthmark gives this away very early on), and you are left wondering how his hand got separated from him. Is this main plot the past (before his hand was cut off), or the present (with this foreign hand being the reason for his clumsiness)? A lot of I Lost My Body is spent trying to figure out the bigger picture, much like a detached body part searching for its owner, or a recently disfigured arm experiencing phantom limb.

The aware, living hand has to fend for itself to get back to where it came from.

I Lost My Body is obsessed with the idea of fate, much like a Christopher Nolan film, or a fairy tale that children get lulled to sleep to. In a cold, grim world like Naoufel’s, all you can hope for is a dream to cling on to. He does just that, even if it is incredibly desperate. He is late for yet another pizza delivery (this time he was actually hit by a car, so it wasn’t his fault for once), and his terrible evening (scratch that: his terrible life) has led up to a previously disgruntled customer, who shows sympathy for his previous accident. The only ounce of care Naoufel has felt in years; it must be love. He chases after this girl by starting a new life, as a stranger to her that can become a part of her story; much like the now-alien hand that is trying to make its existence whole again.

Dan Levy (of indie band The dø) helps turn I Lost My Body into a science-fiction romantic epic (despite its very short length), as the eerie synths go from jarring to gorgeous. The trek for the hand gets more and more scary. Naoufel’s quest begins to bloom into the relationship he was hoping for. The score swells, and everything turns I Lost My Body into a spiritual awakening. Of course, a great tale isn’t without conflict, and fate can only dictate the good of one’s life for so long (before bad luck gets in the way). All of that joy comes crashing down, and the high becomes a sickness in your gut.

Naoufel and Gabrielle discussing fate on a rooftop.

You won’t know how I Lost My Body ends, and that’s exactly how director Jérémy Clapin wants you to feel. In a way that I bet is absolutely intentional, I Lost My Body concludes open ended, as if it lost an appendage of its own. Yet, the entire picture is still beautiful for what it is. We still get a resolution of the entire message: a happiness with what life has granted you, by understanding that fate is not just a journey, but a gift of varying sizes. This is the first animated film to win a major prize at Cannes (the Nespresso Grand Prize). Netflix picked this film up, and released it in time for Oscar season. Now, the Academy Awards have granted it a nomination amongst its Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks peers. As strange and cold as I Lost My Body is, some works of art transcend past arthouse borders, to the point that they absolutely must be accepted on a global level. I Lost My Body is that good. No. Actually, it’s brilliant.

Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.