Father and Daughter (2001)

Michaël Dudok de Wit's wordless animation follows a daughter whose father says goodbye and leaves when she is small, then moves through her whole life, from girlhood to old age, with the longing for him never quite fading. That is what makes it so useful for a grief that has been around for years: it treats missing someone as something carried for a lifetime, not a stage to be finished. It runs about eight and a half minutes with no dialogue, only a score by Normand Roger and Denis L. Chartrand, and it won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film in 2001 as well as the BAFTA for short animation. In the US it is free on Kanopy, and in the UK it streams on Disney+.