The Most Precious of Cargoes (2024)

Initially, I thought we were in for a reversion of “Tom Thumb” as a surly woodcutter and his wife live a subsistence existence in the snowy forest where she longs for a child, but we are swiftly disabused of that theory! Their lives are only ever broken up by the disturbance of the train as it passes through, and it’s when praying to that one day that she thinks she hears a baby crying. Searching the snow, she quickly discovers an infant wrapped in a distinctive blanket and quickly takes it to their home. Her husband, though, feels the child to be an ill omen and wants nothing to do with it, so with her and the bairn confined to the cold of the woodshed, she has to try to find it some milk! That’s just the start of her travails, though, as we are gradually clued in to where this baby came from, and of the fate that awaited it’s parents that led to such a desperate act of love. What now ensues follows her struggle to keep herself and the child from an increasingly approaching war that had hitherto largely left them be, and that might ultimately dot the i’s and cross the t’s of a story that is touching, courageous and heartening. The almost constant wintery scenario adds an additional chill to a stylishly presented animation that features a sparing degree of dialogue, but some fairly effective audio effects to help create a variety of emotions as the child begins to grow and this simple, decent, family find they no longer have their problems to seek. It’s perhaps the last half hour that resonates most, as threads of the tale start to bind together revealing a degree of bleakness and inhumanity on one hand and yet the diametric opposite on the other. What wouldn’t a parent do for a child?