Iron Boy Review (TIFF 2026)
If I had to describe Iron Boy (“Le Corset” in French, dir. Louis Cilchy) in one phrase, it would be, “breathtakingly gorgeous.”
When I went into this film, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I saw a glimpse of footage and found it beautiful, and that’s all I needed to select it as one of the films I was going to see at TIFF. Suffice to say that I was delighted. In a world of 3D animation it is rare to see feature film 2D animation, and especially so with 2D animation like this, where it’s all chinese inkbrush strokes and watercolors on every single frame. In fact, it was before my screening started that producer Céline Vanlint pointed out specifically how no generative AI was used in this film.
I love how you can see the texture of the paper and the brushstrokes across every single frame of this film. There’s never a moment where my mind switches to, “oh, I can tell they used CGI here,” because of that commitment, which is wild for a film that had 26 animators on it. And yet, it all works. What was striking to me specifically was the use of color, where it’s a lot of muted shades of white and yellow and blue, but in specific moments there’s use of a brighter color that really makes it pop.
Iron Boy (or “Le Corset”) is about Christophe, a boy who has a troubling relationship with his father and can’t stand or sit up straight, always leaning to his side, until doctors make him wear an iron corset to fix his posture. Alongside that, he has to essentially reinvent himself to fix his posture, changing how he does things because he can’t move the way he used to. This leads him to playing the organ and swimming, alongside keeping up with his family farm.
It’s at the church where he meets Michel, the elderly man who plays the organ and takes him under his wing to teach him. At swimming, he meets a girl named Clara, who helps him break out of his shell and slowly start to rebel. The film is about adolescence after all, especially about a boy who has to relearn how he operates in his day to day life.
Whenever Christophe gets angry, he tilts and the world alongside him tilts too, with everyone around him moving as he stands upright. It’s a powerful show of force that frames him as all powerful, something the film isn’t subtle about at all given the Christian imagery within all of it. But that lack of subtlety works to its benefit, with the soundtrack sounding like a choir to really elevate that feeling and immerse you in that narrative.
The voice acting is phenomenal too. A lot of the actors in this film have not done a lot of film work before, and even so, they come through with extremely moving performances that ground you within the reality that Cilchy and his team have put together.
I was very pleasantly surprised by Iron Boy, and I’m sure it’s going to remain one of my favourites at the festival this year.
