Young Christopher Gray looks for a way to impress a girl who he hears is no longer with her boyfriend. Meanwhile a father seeks the affection of his son, and heads into town to buy him whatever he wants.
With its rather poetic title being the only thing I knew about this short film, I admit that it sat on my Watch Later queue for quite some weeks while I waited to be in the mood for something a bit arty. I watched it recently because I happened to look up IMDb to see how long it was, only to see that it was created by Felix Massie, a name I know from the equally poetically titled "The Surprise Demise of Francis Cooper's Mother" and "Keith Reynolds Can't Make It Tonight; two short films I enjoyed for different reasons. This short keeps the slightly comic air of detachment which those other shorts also had, however in this case I am not sure it worked quite as well.
The comedic aspect does work well, with a simple structure and quite a few nice visual jokes and clever touches; the material itself avoids any type of sentiment in a way I liked, as well as having some darker elements. However, the extent of this darkness perhaps works against the detached approach, since it feels an ill fit with the material in this case. Additionally the supporting thread feels very detached from the main one – which is distracting and doesn't totally because of this. The animation style is mostly stick-man style blobs, with some detail in the backgrounds, but it has a nice simplicity that I think works well. Surprisingly I found the sound quality quite poor; I did like the "Regular Show" approach of having very natural voicework, but the quality of the recording sounded tinny.
In terms of Massie's other work, I do not think this comes up to the standard I expected. Christopher Gray is amusing, nicely detached, and well animated as is Massie's norm, but I do not think the plot fitted well with these aspects, and that as a whole it maybe did not work as well as it could have done.
