Filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius is not just the director behind Oscar-winning silent comedy The Artist: he’s an artist himself. Drawing since the age of ten, it was this talent that led him to his new movie The Most Precious Of Cargoes, an animated Holocaust drama based on the novella by Jean-Claude Grumberg. ‘Drawings do not lie,’ he says. ‘There’s nothing out of frame. They are just here to evocate and to suggest what happened.’ 

Narrated by the distinguished late actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, this animated film tells of a Polish woodcutter (voiced in French by Grégory Gadeois) and his wife (Dominique Blanc) who adopt a child, thrown by its father from the window of a train bound for the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp. The couple once had a child themselves, and when the woodcutter’s spouse rescues the baby, wrapped in a Jewish prayer shawl, she begins to treat it as her own.

‘The scope of this story goes from the very, very worst a human being can do to the very, very best,’ says Hazanavicius. ‘In my opinion, the woodcutter couple really saved the honour of humanity. They were not supposed to be involved but they involved themselves. They took risks and they saved people.’ 

In the director’s eyes, the only way to tell a story dealing with such horrors was via animation, a medium he was new to. Created by 3.0 Studio, the minimalist hand-drawn characters feel a world away from Hollywood ’toons, but entirely apt for a story as sombre as this one. ‘Animation is to movies what fairytale is to literature in a way, so it was very coherent for me to make an animation movie,’ says Hazanavicius. ‘The goals are the same: create and tell a story, create emotion with images and sound.’

The Most Precious Of Cargoes is in cinemas from Friday 4 April.