bob the moo
There are elements of this short film that I liked, but it is probably truer to say that there are elements that I wanted to like more than I actually did. The plot sees a young boy who has just lost his mother and is struggling with the whole thing. He is befriended by a girl who lives near him, who tells him that his mother is really not dead but rather in space, that the girl herself is an alien, and that she can take him to his mother in her treehouse (which is a spaceship). At its heart the short sees the girl trying to help the boy out with his pain, and at the same time the boy managing to process that by also finding empathy for what the girl has gone through (partly at his own hands).On one hand, this is a nice story, but it has problems at either end of the spectrum of what it is doing. The first is that it is probably too cute; particularly in the quirky opening and, to a lesser extent in the ending too (although the latter at least brings the good idea home in a nice moment). What bugged me more was that I didn't think that it did a great job in delivering the actual central idea of the boy realizing how someone else feels, and while letting himself feel for her, he also lets himself go so he can be comforted and have that connection – it sounds great like this, but in the film it really doesn't come off like that till the end. At one point I really was convinced the girl was suffocating the boy in the suit, perhaps because of him bullying her. I am often slow on the uptake and maybe this is part of it, but for sure the film was not clear during the majority of the middle section, and my understanding was more a matter of working backwards after the short finished, because otherwise it did not come over well.Technically the film looks and sounds good, with a nice sense of childlike imagination to it. It also helps that the two child actors are both likable – although at times they walk a very fine line to being precocious and overly cute. Generally though, despite the good ideas and potential in them, the film doesn't do the core well enough and instead of being clear and engaging, it gets muddled in terms of what it is trying to do, and while the cute ending helps clear it up, it is a bit too little too late.
