Loulou (2026)
After a run of pleasant but forgettable animated shorts in the festival's younger-audiences strand, Loulou was the one that actually got to me. Hanneke van der Linden's short film is a tender, delicately made little thing about grief, and it manages that rarest of tricks, handling something genuinely heavy in a way a small child could understand and hold. Three and a half stars for a lovely, quietly affecting piece of work.
The story is simple and sad in the way the best children's films about loss tend to be. Eight-year-old Sam, grieving his father, chases a butterfly, rescues it from a lake, and then pours everything he has into keeping his new little companion, Loulou, alive. It does not take much to read what the butterfly really stands for, the desperate, understandable instinct to cling to something fragile and keep it from slipping away, and the film is openly about holding tight and letting go, and all the difficult space in between.
What makes it work is how gently it is handled. This is a film that trusts its young audience to feel something real without ever frightening or overwhelming them, and that balance is genuinely hard to strike. It is very delicately produced, finding the emotion in small gestures rather than big speeches, and I came away feeling it would give a grieving child, or a child trying to understand grief, something to hold onto.
It is a beauty to look at, too. The art style is lovely, warm, hand-crafted and properly picturebook, the kind of soft, inviting illustration you would happily have read to you at bedtime, and it is brought to life with real care in the animation. The soundtrack is good as well, underscoring the feeling without ever tipping into the manipulative. Everything about the craft is in service of the emotion rather than showing off.
Three and a half stars. Loulou is a touching, beautifully illustrated and thoughtfully made short about bereavement that does something genuinely valuable, giving children a gentle, honest way into one of the hardest things there is. It is a good short, and a kind one, and I suspect it will stay with both the little ones it is aimed at and the grown-ups watching alongside them.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country Netherlands: The Vanishing (1988), Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020), Father and Daughter (2000)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More animation: Jabberwocky (1971), Dance of the Spirits (2026), Into the Forest (2026)
