Wind

A grandmother and her grandson live inside a bottomless chasm. Objects fall constantly from above and the two of them collect them. The grandmother makes a plan: she will build a flying machine out of the fallen pieces and send the boy up. Years pass, the child grows, and the machine is not finished. Edwin Chang directs. It belongs to Pixar's SparkShorts programme, in which the studio gives its own employees a small budget and a short schedule to make a short film. The source is personal. Chang made it from his grandmother's story of migrating from Korea, and the chasm is built as a figure: a generation spending all its labour to lift the next one out. The visual design differs from Pixar's usual feature language. The light and texture are more abstract, the inside of the chasm is never explained, and the objects that fall from nowhere stand as a comic detail. There is no speech. The narrative runs entirely on movement and music. It runs about nine minutes. The ending is emotional and deliberately painful; the whole weight of the short gathers in the last shot. Who it is for: viewers who like short animation and personal stories built on migration. Who it is not for: it is very short, the narrative is simple, and the metaphor is too plain for some.