Henrietta Bulkowski

This movie is strangely awkward. The animation is clearly impressive but it feels very uncomfortable in an unexplainable way. I kind of wish it was feature length so you'd have time to settle in.

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.

She wanted to look down on the world from the sky. However, she couldn't legally become an airplane pilot because of her disability. But did that mean she couldn't be a passenger? Why couldn't she just buy a plane ticket and look out the window? Or ride on a hot air balloon? Or helicopter? It sounds silly but I could not get past this.

Visually beautiful though, especially that landfill, and the plane, and the little town she built below it.

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

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.