My Moon | Love-Triangle Between the Earth, Sun, & Moon | 2D Animation Short Film

Award-winning 2D animation that gorgeously depicts a love triangle between three celestial bodies: the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth. From Student Academy Award-winner Eusong Lee, this exquisitely animated film revolves around the sad nature of the way the heavenly bodies have to co-exist, as the Earth needs both emotional and practical values from both the Sun and Moon. Executive Produced by Alex Hirsch (Gravity Falls/Disney) SUBMIT A FILM: FULL REVIEW: Subscribe to S/W on YouTube! Website: Instagram: Facebook: Twitter: MY MOON Presented by King of Pine in collaboration with Chromosphere A Film by Eusong Lee “Beautiful design and messy emotions make a sumptuous pairing in Eusong Lee’s piece of celestial fanfic, My Moon, the latest work from the gifted animator previously featured for his Student Academy Award winner Will. The dark and brooding Moon spends his evenings in rapturous embrace with Earth, only to see her enthusiastically rush to the arms of the awaiting Sun come morning. It’s a fraught dynamic that is potentially calamitous for humanity should the delicate balance be disrupted. Lee plays with the raw materials of creation myths, but updates them for our modern technological age of remote communication and social disconnect. A visual treat, the animation itself is the initial draw—Lee’s style discovers this pleasing point between abstract minimalism and mograph maximalism, and the result is intoxicating. It’s also a perfect pairing thematically for his massive subjects whom he anthropomorphizes, and whose relations he narrativizes. To make his subjects human-like was a late decision in Lee’s creative process, initially they possessed their familiar spheres, and so the design must walk the fine line of making them relatable but not too specific in order to maintain their universality. To my mind Lee succeeds wildly, and My Moon should undoubtedly be placed on the shortlist of the year’s most beautiful animations. But design aside, Lee’s defining skill throughout his young career has been to marry nostalgic melancholy to his pristine art and My Moon delivers on this front as well. Classical myths work by ascribing human qualities to the blankness of the cosmos, and Lee’s choice to craft a love triangle out of the heavenly bodies is certainly interesting. In doing so he taps into familiar archetypes—Earth, the fair maiden, is open, genuine, and guileless. Sun is enormous and ebullient. Life-giving, he overwhelms with his warmth. Moon is the main protagonist however, and it is his internal conflict that drives the plot. Draped in his cloak he is a romantic hero of dramatic intensity, but is also the extraneous partner—he is a satellite of Earth, she is his everything, but he cannot fulfill a similar role in her life. Cool, yet wounded, deep, but brusque, he reminded me of famous conceptual characters from fantasy like Dream from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, or the character of Winter from Naomi Novik’s excellent new novel Spinning Silver. Of course love triangles between opposing personality types have themselves an enormous cultural footprint, from the classics (Wuthering Heights), to the pulp (the beloved shoujo mangas of my youth). Adding to the wistfulness of the film’s arrangement is the nature of the character’s communications. They do not speak to each other, at least not directly. Instead they snatch dialogue pulled out of radio programs, television shows, and lovers’ phone calls in a patchwork arrangement. The conceit is that the celestial bodies are incapable of direct communication but through the chatter we humans constantly put out into space via the airwaves they are able piece together thoughts. It’s a fascinating concept, and works thematically with the film—there is something heart-wrenching to the disembodied dialogue, and the multitudinous voices featured, that amplifies this feel of disconnection that both illustrates Moon’s despair, but also feeds into a general sense of technological pessimism. Naturally it helps supports Lee’s wish to not personify his characters too greatly and maintain some sort of abstract remove, but it also is just fitting—the difficulty to find words for complex emotions that, even with perfect diction, may be too difficult to express.“ S/W Curator, Jason Sondhi CREDITS Written and Directed By Eusong Lee Producer Sarah Kambara Original Score Sound Design & Mix by David Kamp Background Design & Color Jasmin Lai, Lauren Zurcher Animation Director Natan Moura Compositing Director Stéphane Coëdel Produced in Association with Chromosphere LA Reproduced on this channel with the permission of the filmmaker