Michel Gondry’s beautiful gift to his daughter

From his stop motion short films made for his daughter, the inventive director produces a moving and facetious film, which recalls his beginnings.

IThere are fathers who read stories to their children before going to bed. And others who make films for them, like Michel Gondry. For six years, the director ofEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind made stop-motion short films in his office for his daughter, who was between 3 and 9 years old at the time. Colored paper, scissors, tape bought at the supermarket, a smartphone to film, and then the dad asked Maya to choose the title of the story she wanted to see, and of which she would invariably be the heroine. Today, selected pieces of this family cinematic experience are therefore compiled and offered to the general public.

Maya is taking a bath, Maya a policewoman and the three cats, Maya in the sea with a bottle of ketchup… For the Gondry father and daughter, poetry and the absurd go hand in hand. In his adventures, the not shy child comes across his father who plays the drums in the center of the Earth so as not to disturb, his mother who shrinks cucumbers into pickles using the “conconchon”, his grandmother Boom-Boom who pilots a “punch plane” and Pampa la frita, the king of fries, who helps him absorb all the ketchup spilled into the sea – because fries love ketchup, everyone knows that.

We smile very often, we are also moved. Once again, Michel Gondry shifts reality and adjusts it to his vision, multiplies the style exercises around the sole constraint of the title – and that of amusing Maya. Read with cheerfulness by Pierre Niney, alter ego of the director in the recent Book of solutions – where he already created a mini-cartoon in stop motion, “Max the fox opens a hair salon” – Maya’s stories borrow a little from Queneau and Tex Avery, but above all from the handyman genius of early Gondry, of his music videos made from a thousand discoveries – for Björk, The White Stripes… Close to a beginner director’s manual, where we see the hands cutting, the wires sticking out and the sets coming out of the Canson paper, Maya… enchants and constitutes, above all, a superb declaration of love from a father to his daughter.