Pupa (Movie)

I like the style and music, and the concept is one I resonate with strongly. I feel the need to rate this a 4.5, but in lieu of partials for our rating system, I'm rating it a 5. Why? Because it's not that it's bad... it's just painfully... plain.

It's a simple, safe representation of taking the first steps to overcoming depression. I respect it, and I wish good things to the student who made this film. At the same time, I'm not really sure if I'd recomend this. It's short, so if you want to watch a slightly feel good story about overcoming depressing, I'd ... day there's better ones but that this is alright.

I find myself not wanting to be too hard on student films. This is well-made, and there's nothing particularly bad about it, and while I won't say there's nothing good about it, this is very flatly average and a very cliche depiction of sadness, grief, licking your wounds a bit, and then moving on to confront a new day—maybe renewed; maybe not. We don't really get a sense for what the character feels or thinks other than the raw emotions presented through the animation in this ultra-short 3-min student film without any dialogue.

Like, it's not fan servicey when you see her heinie or her ... body undulating in the nude. THIS IS ART! It's visual storytelling that uses simple and easily relatable symbols. Just reading the title Pupa, tells you about ALL you need to know to understand this short. And, no, this is not the trashy and fetishy brother-sister guro thing. This is a SOPHISTICATED Tokyo University of the Arts production.

Wow, I feel enriched already. Art, culture, wow. She's a modern lady, so her apartment is a wreck, and she eats ramen bricks all day and collects plastic water bottles. We get just fine hand-drawn teary-eyed animation fuzziness whisking us away into decent creatively arranged transitions in the more classical animation sense (sometimes...), instead of just film editing 101 or uncreative TV stuff. She mills about, watches TV, CRIES INTENSELY in quick cuts, holds her face in agony... *INSERT RANDOM CLUTTERED INTERIOR B-ROLL*. Fast cuts, a butterfly, sudden piano, and sad violin to show she is such a pretty little flower, etc.

Frankly, I feel like this was autobiographical, and the female character is an insert for the author. She spent all that time animating, accumulating trash, and then by the end, she's like "Man, that was agony. I didn't have any idea what to do, so I just depicted how hard it was for me to figure out what to animate, and by creating, I'm like, renewing myself, like a flower, you know?" Then she dumps out all the trash that accumulated during her time animating, and that's the final shot in the animation, too. Pretty deep stuff.