Does taking the standard story of boy meets girl, the formation of a family, and then growing old together, stripping out all of the substance and universalizing it, lead to a more artistic or worthwhile short? Would a longer work that adds the parts in-between the highlights shown here be better? It's always a matter of execution, but there's such a depersonalized everyman quality to this that it rings hollow. A long-form work can allow the artist to remove the sap and (hopefully) develop a more affecting work. With the short form, we're forced to substitute the maple syrup for high fructose corn syrup to have any effect at all.
The back-and-forth pendulum of a clock gimmick is fairly nice for creative animation and to avoid an excessive amount of cuts—it presents the animation with a free-flow stream of consciousness to the events, but it gets a little tiresome. There's plenty of revolving camera movement and the camera always remains dynamic, the more calm the pendulum becomes. There's not much experimentation with the basic idea other than the obvious futility of attempting to stop time. Everything about the short is predictable.
I'd partly like to experiment with setting this to different music, as I think the cloying sounds are the worst thing about this short—there's almost nothing I despise more than sentimental piano + violin. Gag. I'm sure many people will say "It's beautiful uwu" or "The most perfect thing I've ever heard along with stunning animation," but it makes me ill just thinking about it.
