Another few minutes to myself on Disney Plus, so I decided to continue running through the short films on there and watched "The Ballad of Nessie" a short that originally aired before the 2011 "Winnie The Pooh" feature.
Happy and playful, Nessie is enjoying her life in pond in the Scottish Highlands. Her life is upset though by a developer who destroys the pond and levels the surrounding land for a golf course. Having searched for weeks for a replacement waterway, Nessie becomes despondent and starts to cry. She cries nonstop for weeks on end, until she can't cry anymore, at which point she discovers that she has flooded the area with her tears and created Loch Ness.
There's a nice little lesson at the heart of "The Ballad of Nessie", one which you might argue wasn't really needed given the strength of the animation and the quality of Billy Connolly's narration. The idea that keeping a stiff upper lip and bottling up your emotions aren't a good thing is the message and it's a noble one.
The animation style is good, a soft edged pencil style with calls back to Disney's 70's style. The whole piece is written like a poem and performed as such by Billy Connolly in the way only he can.
It's charming and pleasant rather than life alteringly brilliant, but that's all you really need.
