Big Picture Big Sound

This Group of Shorts Fall Short

Bear Story, (Gabriel Osorio and Pato Escala)
Prologue, (Richard Williams and Imogen Sutton)
Sanjay's Super Team, (Sanjay Patel and Nicole Grindle)
We Can't Live Without Cosmos, (Konstantin Bronzit)
World of Tomorrow, (Don Hertzfeldt)

Weak group, with one clearly the most entertaining.

Bear Story. A sad tale that features a melancholy old bear who stands on a local street corner, where he makes a living by offering a peek into his mechanical diorama. The peek is into the story of a circus bear who longs to escape and return to the family from which he was taken. Oddly compelling, but perhaps not compelling enough.

Prologue. 2,400 years ago, four warriors - two Spartan and two Athenian - battle to the death in an intense struggle witnessed by a little girl, who then runs to her grandmother for comfort. Unclear what the point is and at the end you can't help but think that it wasn't worth its short amount of time.

Sanjay's Super Team. Young Sanjay, a first-generation Indian-American, is obsessed with television, cartoons and his superhero action figures. He is reluctant to spend time in daily prayers with his devout Hindu father, but a flight of imagination helps him develop a new perspective that he and his father can both embrace. Very pretty and colorful, but a little heavy-handed.

We Can't Live Without Cosmos. Two best friends have dreamed since childhood of becoming cosmonauts, and together they endure the rigors of training and public scrutiny, and make the sacrifices necessary to achieve their shared goal. Subtle, moving, and made me smile at the end.

World of Tomorrow. A little girl named Emily is taken on a fantastical tour of her distant future by a surprising visitor who reveals unnerving secrets about humanity's fate. Clever, and at times intriguing, but drags a bit.