On the face of it this short film will make you focus on the fact that a young girl appears to have a whale for a grandfather and indeed if you don't just accept this as the way it is told then you will get hung up on it. To me the story here is a young girl who loved her grandfather who had time for her despite being as old and big and slow as a whale. The memory of him is transformed in this short film to be something more creative which is then nicely animated. It feels very personal and intimate which does tend to mean that it may not be accessible to everyone – and indeed it wasn't to me.
So there were aspects I did not fully understand or appreciate but this is not to say the film as a whole did not work. The animation is simple but effective and the music drifts nicely across the short helping the mood of memory and reflection. The device of the grandfather as a whale fits with the sea although the downside is that it can obscure the meaning by distracting with the detail. All told though it works pretty well for what it is and I enjoyed it as a small, intimate short film.
