This is a very beautifully executed and visually stunning short, though I'd recommend watching it more than once, as the story is largely inferred, at least in the beginning. It reminded me a great deal of Father and Daughter, by Michael Dudok DeWit. I don't know just how close this came to an Academy Award nomination for Animated Short, but I wouldn't have been disappointed in the least if it had been short-listed, because it's very good. As I want to talk at least a bit about the short, there will be minor spoilers:
The short follows a little boy through his life, with an early emphasis on his childhood. As I understood the short's storyline, the young boy's father was a pilot who was killed in a crash, though why the plane crashed, I'm unsure-possibly in a war or possibly just a crash. Told with no dialog and only a few vocal sounds, the boy's life is shown visually-first a lengthy sequence showing the boy at play, with either his memories or his imagination flashing periodically on screen.
There's then a brief middle section marking the passage of the years, told in visual cues which showcase life milestones-athletic accomplishments, marriage, a growing family and so on. At the end, the young man is now an old man and walks what looks to be some of the same ground he ran through as a boy earlier in the short and the ending has a beautiful moment which nicely brings things more or less full circle.
This short is included as an extra short on a DVD collection of the 2005 Academy Award shorts, which includes three of the five Animated Short nominees and all five of the Live-Action nominees, with two non-nominated animated shorts (Imago and The Fan and the Flower, by Bill Plympton) presumably to augment the disc to make up for the fact that two of the nominees are missing. I recommend both this short and the disc wholeheartedly.
The short follows a little boy through his life, with an early emphasis on his childhood. As I understood the short's storyline, the young boy's father was a pilot who was killed in a crash, though why the plane crashed, I'm unsure-possibly in a war or possibly just a crash. Told with no dialog and only a few vocal sounds, the boy's life is shown visually-first a lengthy sequence showing the boy at play, with either his memories or his imagination flashing periodically on screen.
There's then a brief middle section marking the passage of the years, told in visual cues which showcase life milestones-athletic accomplishments, marriage, a growing family and so on. At the end, the young man is now an old man and walks what looks to be some of the same ground he ran through as a boy earlier in the short and the ending has a beautiful moment which nicely brings things more or less full circle.
This short is included as an extra short on a DVD collection of the 2005 Academy Award shorts, which includes three of the five Animated Short nominees and all five of the Live-Action nominees, with two non-nominated animated shorts (Imago and The Fan and the Flower, by Bill Plympton) presumably to augment the disc to make up for the fact that two of the nominees are missing. I recommend both this short and the disc wholeheartedly.
