The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation

Add my voice to those who are underwhelmed with this Oscar winning short. This is the personal story of filmmaker John Canemaker attempting to come to terms with his deceased father. Using a variety of animation techniques, home movies and photos Camemaker imagines a conversation between himself and his father. What were his father's secrets and why did his Dad do the things he did? Canemaker takes a stab at trying to work out things, but because the answers were never revealed in life the answers revealed here seem some how more wishful thinking than anything else. Its not bad but it never really seemed to amount to much. The problem with the film for me was that the material seems to be almost too personal, it never transcended into a universalness that great stories do. Its not bad, really, its not, its not great, certainly not best of the year (Bill Plymton's Fan and the Flower is infinitely better as are the other Oscar nominated shorts).