The Monk and the Fish

Dir: Michaël Dudok de Wit

1994

****

Michael Dudok de Wit’s Le Moine et le poisson (The Monk and the Fish), is a wonderfully playful short animation, one of the last of its kind to use classic cel animation techniques using simply a brush, Indian Ink and watercolours and no computer involvement whatsoever. Standing next to a water reservoir in a monastery enclave, our titular monk sees a fish and races off to get his net to catch it. However, the fish eludes him and the monk gets more and more agitated as he tries increasingly extreme ways of catching it. He soon gets into the pond himself and also enlists the help of other monks from the monastery. He tries candles and a bow and arrow and chases it night and day to no avail. The more the fish manages to evade him, the more obsessed the monk becomes. He follows the fish out of the pond into a canal, through different landscapes and out of the confines of the monastery. Eventually the chase gets less frantic and the monk and the fish begin to move in harmony. In the wonderfully zen finale, both monk and fish float through a symbolic doorway into a vast open space and drift off into the sky together. It’s hard to decide who comes of best in the end, the monk, the fish or the audience. It’s simple, universal and beautifully unpredictable. It’s also remarkably rewarding, for a story that doesn’t really develop until the last few seconds of the film. It was nominated for the Academy Award for best Animated Short at the 67th Oscars and set Michael Dudok de Wit on his way (he would eventually win for his 2000 short animation Father and Daughter). There is wonderfully playful edge to de Wit’s largely symbolic, serious and zen-like stories, so it is no wonder that years later Studio Ghibli came calling.