Time takes its toll on us all.
Body parts sag, all those things we thought we’d get done don’t get done, or at least not in the way we envisaged, and we find ourselves tumbled along by life to places we never ever thought we’d be.
It’d not necessarily always a bad thing but it does come at a price, and it sometimes takes everything we have to stay the course.
Spare a thought then for the mountainous chunk of rock in Seth Boyden’s absolutely delightful short film, An Object at Rest, which try as it might, can’t seem to stay out of the way of humanity’s evolutionary march to self-perceived greatness, and finds itself a rather actively-involved witness to the relentlesss onslaught of time.
There’s a lot to love about this remarkable piece of animation as Scott Beggs at Film School Rejects notes:
“It’s got a simple appeal to it, bolstered by an animation style that’s halfway between Hanna-Barbera and Studio Ghibli and anchored by an instantly lovable character who just wants to get a few millennia of sleep. He becomes a reluctant adventurer, propelled by industrious people and Boyden’s imagination. It’s also a nice twist on what has become a healthy trope in animated short films — showing a static figure who wants to be more but is rooted in place. Instead of the lovesick volcano in Lava or the trees of Rooted, An Object at Rest gets an anthropomorphic character who couldn’t care less about achieving more than a nap.”
It ends on a happy note of sorts but not before the lovely, long-suffering mountain finds himself take on the sort of journey he never thought he’d undertake.