How to condense a lifetime into ten minutes? It’s maybe the very bleakly white style of this animation that starts by rewinding a man’s life back into the womb that manages to help it encapsulate some of the absurdities of being. When we are young, an annual event is seen as being positively aeons apart - especially as they might be more associated with fun. As we grow up, though, those timeframe references change and we become more aware of our own smallness, insignificance and maybe even irrelevance as our life cycle creates new beginnings that exist within the same time-honoured constructs. How can we stop it, though? Perhaps his fascination with insects, and beetles in particular, might reveal something useful? The stop-motion is strikingly both detailed and simple and the narration mixes a fluid narrative with some statements of fact - frequently asked as questions - that readily resonate with many of us who have gotten so used to time being there to be killed rather than enjoyed. Food for thought.
