‘Maya, Give Me A Title’ Review – Michel Gondry Animates His Daughter’s Imagination In Earnest Love Letter Of A Film [NYICFF 2025]

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, a pillar in the study of child development and psychology, once said, “Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves.” One can only assume that it’s even easier for them to comprehend the things they create when one of their parents is a filmmaker. But the beauty of Michel Gondry’s new film, Maya, Give Me a Title – the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind director’s first animated feature – lies in the shared goal at its heart, that of connection and collaboration between father and daughter. An impassioned, handmade work of stop-motion that primarily utilizes paper cutouts, Gondry’s latest is not just the best thing he’s made in years, but it feels like it could serve as a catalyst for the French director’s next chapter. Given that his most notable post-Spotless Mind projects are 2011’s The Green Hornet and the now-cancelled Pharrell Williams biopic Golden, perhaps a new direction wouldn’t hurt.

At the very least, Maya feels like an inspired turn for Gondry, even if the most thanks are owed to his daughter, the film’s titular character. Comprised of multiple shorts that were made at the young Maya’s request while her father lived halfway across the world, the film manages to feel connected despite its segmented nature; the shorts all have Maya’s imagination as a throughline, and though the 61-minute film doesn’t pretend to believe that each of her stories is related, it’s impossible not to note that Gondry views each as an opportunity both to further understand his daughter and to play with her, even as they sat thousands of miles apart. 

The result is adorably chaotic, the perfect visual representation of youthful curiosity run riot. As the title states, Gondry repeatedly solicited open-ended prompts from his daughter over a span of six years, requesting a concept and/or title with which he’d create a story, perhaps one that he might have shared with Maya at bedtime were they together. For example: A documentary that follows Maya as she takes pictures of France during an earthquake, aptly named “Maya Watches an Earthquake.” This first short sets the tone for the film, not necessarily in its contents – though they are as zany as every other selection we see over the ensuing hour – but in how Maya maintains creative control of what her father makes for her. If she senses that he’s moving in a direction that is not aligned with the one she has in her own head, her voice interrupts the film’s narrator (Pierre Niney of The Count of Monte Cristo) to reconfirm that Gondry’s vision is in lockstep with her own. These moments are made all the more rewarding by Gondry’s willingness to show his work; the camera often peels back here, and we see the director’s hands jostling the position of his cut-out tableau and its characters in order to fit Maya’s specifications.

At its core, Maya, Give Me a Title is certainly a cinematic testament to a child’s creativity through the eyes of a parent, but it’s also a look at how parents are often positioned to play a part in the fantasies concocted by their brood. Some of the tales that Maya has Michel bring to life are more difficult to imagine a kid sharing with their parent than others. “Maya Takes Her Bath” prominently features a potion that causes Maya to shrink to the point where she drifts down the drain and ends up in the kitchen sink, mere moments after her mother has accidentally cut off her arm. (This elicited a number of audible reactions from the New York International Children’s Film Festival audience, and plenty of eyes were shielded from the “horrors” unfolding on screen.) I had to remind myself that this was a French film, thus explaining some of the film’s more mature moments, i.e. nudity, occasional gore, and quips that felt like subtle nods at the patience elder viewers often have to exhibit at these screenings. 

Ultimately, patience isn’t all that tested, as Give Me a Title ends just before it becomes exhausting. It’s a close call given how Gondry packs in tales of Maya as a mermaid, a detective, a ship admiral, an alien, and more, all in just a tick over an hour. As the aforementioned Piaget once proclaimed, “play is the work of childhood,” and Gondry’s film is a playground for silliness to run amok, its characters and set-ups not working all that hard, but also not “hardly working,” as the saying goes. Then again, another common phrase comes to mind in Maya’s aftermath: “If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.” Something tells me that Gondry’s animating hands might disagree; something else tells me that he doesn’t mind the blisters given who they were in service of.

Maya, Give Me a Title had its North American premiere at the New York International Children’s Film Festival. 

Director: Michel Gondry

Screenwriter: Michel Gondry

Rated: NR

Runtime: 61m