Yet the morose woodcutter, initially just a figure of unreflective, almost brutish physical strength, comes to realise that “The Heartless have a heart”. Much against his will, he begins to love the little girl, turns a knot of wood into a spinning ballerina and even proves willing to die defending her. And the viewer, of course, comes to understand that even a seemingly heartless, ignorant antisemite can have a heart too.
Michel Hazanavicius’s remarkable animated feature film is based on Jean-Claude Grumberg’s rather self-conscious 2019 novella, The Most Precious of Cargoes: A Fable of the Holocaust. We discover that the baby has been thrown from a train on the way to a death camp by a father desperate to keep at least one member of his family alive. So this is a story of the redemptive power of parental love set against a backdrop of the most heinous atrocities.
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