SNAPSHORT
Adulting can be hard. Some days you’re nailing it, while other days, you’re just a stack of kids hiding in a trench coat hoping no one notices. Gia finds herself in this exact scenario the night of her 21st birthday. This is a story about the insecurities of adulting and how we’re all just faking it till we make it. (synopsis courtesy The Disney Wiki)
Let’s be honest – no matter how adult we get, we all feel, more often than we’d like to, that we are a complete and utter fake.
I mean, how we can possibly be an adult?
We don’t know the first thing about anything! Or so we think.
It’s a pretty universal feeling and Pixar’s Aphton Corbin, who has been with the animation company since 2016, working on Soul and Toy Story 4, captures it beautifully and with so much poeticism in Twenty Something, the genesis of which Corbin explained to D23.
“While I was working on Soul, I was asked if I wanted to direct my very own SparkShort. I did what many of you might’ve done: I panicked. ‘What were they thinking?’ I felt like I had been at the studio for such a short time; were they asking the right person? After hyperventilating for what felt like months, I decided to dig deeper into my imposter syndrome. I like to draw comics, especially when I’m feeling insecure, and this comic I drew back in 2018 [dealt with those feelings]… After I was given this opportunity to direct a SparkShort, that [insecure] feeling crept back up again—feeling like an adult one minute [and] feeling like kids stacked in a trench coat the next. Something about this idea clicked… So, the first part of my journey was taking that [comic] idea and turning it into a fleshed-out story.”
Watching this emotionally resonant, beautiful piece of animated short storytelling, you suddenly realise that regardless of how old you get, that you still feel like a little kid peeking out from the trenchcoat, hoping no one notices that you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing.
Corbin realises this perfectly as three age-specific iterations of the protagonist Gia who finds herself on the night of her 21st birthday in a nightclub, technically an adult but feeling like she is not adulting at all well.
Watching her struggle to fake it ’til you make it, you realise, with fresh insight, just how you feel when clocking up a certain age supposedly means you have it all together but when you are, in fact, a messy work in progress.
Pixar has a knack of telling stories that affect you deeply on one way or another and Twenty Something (which comes complete with a chilled and evocative song by ASTU) is no exception, auguring well for Corbin to direct her own feature film one day which will no doubt knock it completely out of the park.
Twenty Something is now available to watch on Disney Plus.