Henrietta Bulkowski

I could not love this more - incredible animation and a reminder that everyone has dreams and that they can be fulfilled in surprising ways.

This is the story of a Henrietta Bulkowski, a young woman with kyphosis, who wants to become a pilot. It is set in what appears to be the 1930's in what seems to be Canada. Henrietta (Christina Hendricks) has help from a male friend, Danny Wilcox (Chris Cooper) in her attempt to accomplish her dream. The story starts out as a tale about a young woman bravely trying to deal with the hand that life dealt her, then the story changes. It really changes! The movie suddenly and shockingly becomes a different film. The short is bipolar! The movie is great to look at, obviously a good sum of money was spent here. Writer/director Rachel Johnson is gifted and "Henrietta Bulkowski" is worth seeing, but prepare to be startled.

A woman afflicted with an unfortunate hunchback is not give the proper medical clearance to fly. So with with grit, spit and determination decides to rebuild a junker that will prove to all no perceived disability will prevent her dream. Though you want the end to be more grounded in reality, metaphorically speaking we can be rewarded for our efforts in some spiritual way. We can assume a few things in the wake of the end result but I imagined angels. Which require no Earthbound logic.

Unfortunately I sat all the way through this mess of a film. You can't cover up the holes in the story with nice animation, and it just goes to show, don't judge a book, or film, by its pretty cover.

A woman who has such a hunchback that she can only look down dreams of becoming a pilot so she can see the world in the only attitude she knows: from above. When her physical disability means she can't become a pilot, she decides to become one anyway, by repairing a crashed airplane in a junkyard..

I sat through to the end of this short, wondering how it was going to turn out. Would Henrietta be heartbroken? Would the plane fly? Instead, it went off into an ending that came out of left field and made absolute mush out of the issues of the story.

Sometimes the people who create stories chicken out and avoid the issues by having their protagonists wake up. That turns any attempt to tell a story into something utterly pointless.