Tompswell, the Finland-based animator, is the talent behind the award-winning The Brightest Star. It’s the story of a kid who falls into a cave.
In the cave’s darkness, our exploring kid meets something… perhaps it’s a kind thing, perhaps not!
In the video’s YouTube blurb, Tompswell writes;
I was driven to create this film because of two reasons. Firstly, I grew up with classic Disney and Studio Ghibli animations and have been a huge fan ever since. Visually ‘The Brightest Star’ is like a love letter to my childhood. I am not as solid a traditional animator as them though, so I developed this interesting technique to combine 3D and 2D animations in a way that it would feel like the classical animations. It also pays tribute to Finnish folklore and nature by drawing inspiration from them. The second reason is that I needed to process the difficult emotions dealing with the loss of a loved one. The question “what happens after we die?” is a scary one, and it may be comforting to imagine that we won’t have to face it alone.
The last few seconds might change your mind about what happened.
I’m not much of an art critic, but I get shades of Oskar Fischinger here due to the abstract animation in the sometimes Bauhaus minimalist animation and score.
In fact, let’s stay with the soundtrack for a while because with the exception of those amazing/dreadful last few seconds, I think they’d make a great backdrop to a D&D or similar adventure.
I was even thinking of Wild Beyond the Witchlight at one point. This official adventure delves into the Feywild, a realm of wonder and magic with hints of childhood dreams and fears. The encounter shown with the spirit in The Brightest Star” could be run as a scene with an archfey or a powerful entity from the Feywild. The kid’s journey into the unknown could be setting up the players’ own exploration of the Feywild, or it could even be a spookier alternative to the D&D classic cartoon and the cave monster is the alternative to the fairground ride.
Ready for another? On Geek Native, you can leap between short films by using teleport links like this. The catch? It’s a random film.
