Wild Summon

A perfect 15 minutes of pure imagination, ingenuity, and emotional punch. I've watched it multiple times and it gets deeper after each revisit. Incredibly special animation mixed with the real world. Kudos to these filmmakers, may they win every award and be seen around the world.

Who could ever imagine such emotion and sensitivity coming from a salmon. That's the genius behind this film, and a rare feat of emotional filmmaking. We are all connected on planet earth, no matter species.

I wasn't familiar with these directors before seeing this but I will be watching out for them far into the future.

Swapping human beings - in pink and goggled wetsuits - for the fish, this entertaining short film takes us on the salmon run. From high upstream where they spawn through the perilous journey to the sea and then, of course, back up the river again to lay their eggs and start the process all over again. These folks face the same dangers the fish do - bears, long-beaked birds, trawlers and just as they feed on smaller things, they are fed upon themselves before some succeed - and even that merely delivers death from old age or exhaustion. The animation is fun, quirky and sometimes even a bit brutal displaying some parallels to the human rat-race of the day-in day-out routine, urban congestion etc. I did quite enjoy this.

I thought it dragged on quite a bit, and while the concept was fun for the first few minuets, I very quickly started to think that I would've just preferred to watch a nature documentary with normal salmon. It felt like it was a very simple, very clear message that could've gotten across after a minuet or two, but it goes on for fourteen. I felt like the movie was trying very hard to make me feel bad about eating fish, and it's possible it would have worked if it had been shorter. Because it was so long and so similar to an actual nature documentary, I had time to think about how actual salmon are just salmon and not tiny people.

In this mock nature documentary, the life cycle of the wild salmon is shown from the pebbles of the spawning brook, to the sea, and back to the brook. The kicker here is that the fish are replaced with human figures in wet suits and face masks.

It's a clever.... well, there's a symbolic component to the replacement, but its result is at once to mock the form of the nature documentary, instill a sense of compassion for its subject, and to make the whole thing ridiculous. Whether one, the other, or all three will strike you as worthwhile, or even the entire thing as lacking merit, is a statement of who you are rather than this movie. You may argue that it goes on too long, and I wish a couple of minutes had been trimmed from its 14-minute length. However, it certainly moves along at a speedier clip than the usual lugubriously-narrated nature documentary.

I saw this at the IFC in New York as part of "Best Animated Shorts" show for the 2024 Oscars. It was included as an extra. To the Academy's shame, it wasn't nominated.

I reckon the (short) movie should be telling us "no pun intended". I mean why do I have to always say it? Ok, right, it is kind of because I like to use them - puns that is .... though I reckon one might say that we do like to use fish (mostly for eating purposes of course. Will the movie be able to change your mind? Tough to say, but it does make quite the compelling case to say the least.

The fact we humanize (in a fantastic kind of way) Salmon ... well it is a genius move to say the least. And it makes sense to a degree. It also makes the whole short a lot more interesting and easier to follow - is that a pun? Well you know the drill ... and where it will lead to -> no pun intended.