My Grandfather's Demons (Portuguese title: Os Demónios do Meu Avô) is a 2022 Portuguese CGI/claymation film directed by Nuno Beato.
Rosa (Victoria Guerra) is a top employee at an undefinable big company. One day she learns her grandfather Marcelino (António Durães) has died, which leads to her having a breakdown. She takes some time off to return to the village where Marcelino lived and where she spent much of her childhood. There she discovers her family's troubled history and that Marcelino committed some mistakes she must make right again.
Tropes:
- Boyfriend-Blocking Dad: Marcelino is very bearish about letting his teenage granddaughter hang out with boys he doesn't know. She brushes him off and goes with them despite his protests.
- Bratty Teenage Daughter: The teenaged Rosa is shown being totally absorbed in her cellphone, voicing her annoyance at doing gardening with Marcelino and even treating him a little like a servant when she makes him carry her backpack after coming home from school.
- A Dog Named "Dog": Rosa only calls her cat "Cat".
- Excrement Statement: The villagers dump animal (probably cow) crap on Rosa's car hood as a show of disrespect to the descendant of the one who "cursed" their village.
- Gratuitous English: João is as Portuguese as the rest of the characters but often needlessly says things in English. He's meant to come off as obnoxious for it. Rosa also does it (at one point letting out a "damn" when venting to João over the phone), but less often, and not at all when talking to the villagers.
- High-Powered Career Woman: Rosa works at a high-tech company and is very career-driven, hard-working and competent. However she also has to deal with co-workers saying she only got so far because of her boyfriend and her own exhaustion and sense of emptiness. This leads to her having a breakdown in the office and destroying her supplies in front of her colleagues upon learning Marcelino died.
- Intergenerational Friendship: Rosa, a career woman in her 20s, makes friends with Chico, a local young kid who teaches her how to garden and tend the fields properly.
- Medium Blending: The initial scenes, which are set in the big city, are done in CGI. When Rosa goes back to the village she grew up in, the CGI peels off and scatters like leaves blown away by the wind, revealing the claymation underneath. Afterwards, CGI still crops up whenever Rosa speaks to her city friends and her attorney through her phone.
- Plot-Triggering Death: Learning that Marcelino has passed away is what prompts Rosa to return to her childhood village.
- Stargazing Scene: Rosa appreciates the amount of stars that can be seen from the village. Her City Mouse friend João can seemingly only appreciate them through his phone screen, which has an app that shows the constellations.
- The Stinger: After the closing credits roll, a brief clip plays showing animators working on the scene of Marcelino trying to care for his baby daughter.
- Took a Level in Kindness: Rosa. Part of the reason she gets along poorly with the villagers at first (other than the "curse") is because she has a short temper, just like her grandfather. Realizing it brought her grandfather nothing good, she learns to be kinder and to work together with the villagers.
- Water Source Tampering: The vindictive and misanthropic Marcelino somehow stopped the river from running, depriving the entire village of water. The villagers say he cursed them, but the actual explanation turns out to be mundane; he devised a mechanism to block the river from flowing. Rosa discovers it and makes the river flow again.
