Disney Pixar's 'Wind': The SparkShorts film blends magic with realism and leaves you with a beautiful cliffhanger
Disney Sparkshots is here with a brand new film titled 'Wind'. The nine-minute short that encapsulates a huge message is definitely going to leave you teary-eyed by the end. Although it is a silent movie, the perfect animation and graphics speak for themselves.
The film takes us to an underground place secluded from the world. That dark dingy place contains boulders and rocks that levitate. It also has a lot of junk and scrap material that has been forgotten and abandoned by people.
The only thing that's keeping the place alive is the activity of the 'Wind'. It keeps the rocks and scrap afloat. Amid all this chaos lives a little boy and his granny who, by the looks of it, are trapped here.
They have been living on these boulders in a very nomadic style. No rock is their permanent home and they constantly keep moving around changing boulders. They are trying their best to escape from this place and go into the real world with blue skies and fluffy white clouds.
The duo is stuck in some sort of an underworld, which here can be a metaphor of the life of people who struggle to make ends meet. They enjoy the most simple things in life which is evident when the boy uses his crafty mind to use the junk to make a whole new innovation — the rocket.
This may represent people in the lower section of society trying to make a place for themselves in the real world. The boy tries to accommodate the granny into the rocketship, but there is place only for one.
He desperately wants his granny to come with him. Soon, the granny comes up with an idea to get out of that place and it involves her being tied to the rocket with a string. We know how realism works, but a kid can believe in magic and miracles!
The film is based on the elements of magic and realism bringing in a fictional possibility of being tied to a rocket. The boulders are a symbolism of the harsh world that we live in today. It will only allow the survival of the fittest.
It also deals with a major chunk of escapism which is seen as the duo tries to escape their reality by trying to fly out into the real world.
Till the rocket starts, we assume that the grandmother has tied herself to the other end. But it is only towards the end of the film that we realize that she let her grandson go because that was the plan!
She sacrificed herself maybe because she is too old and knows that her time has come. She does not want her grandson to suffer alone in the underworld.
You will definitely cry seeing the lunchbox wrapped in pink cloth fly upwards with the wind as a memory of the sweet grandmother who gave her life to help her grandson so that he could live a better life outside.
The film is directed by Edwin Wooyoung Chan and through his eyes, it has a very Eastern influence on the appearance of the characters and the lunchbox.
Disney Pixar's 'Wind' is a part of SparkShorts, a series of American independent animated short films produced by Pixar Animation Studios, and it drops on Disney+ on December 13.
