4. Short Film Analysis: Father and Daughter.

2000 Academy Award winner for Animated Short Film, this piece depicts the relationship between father and daughter. The film begins when they are on a bike ride: the father starts at the front, but throughout the ride, the daughter begins to overtake him signifying his old age. Moreover, when they reach the end, the daughter wants to go, but the father has to stop, contrasting her youth towards her father's old age. So when the father leaves on the boat it symbolically represents his death, the metaphor throughout the film. The daughter frantically looks for her father, but as time passes, so does he.

She moves on and rides away, this time alone. But she comes back at sunset, hoping to see her father. However, his bike is still there and he is no where to be seen. A fade then indicates the changing of seasons through the landscape but at the same time, representing the change in the girl.  She becomes a young woman, tackling all sorts of weather in search for her father. But as she grows, she has a family and in time she becomes old. She still however has a deep longing for her father to return. 

Particularly at 6:00 we really begin to see her grief throughout her life. ironically as the bike falls down, it represents her old age, instead of the father at the begin. Most importantly, we see the wheel turning, a metaphor for life as a circle, and that birth and death will always occur. The riverbed, now an overgrown wasteland, explains that she has died and is now travelling in the afterlife to see her father. She reaches the empty boat, lies down and waits. As she sees something, she runs, turning back into a girl. She meets her father and they are reunited.