This years' animation shorts are a revenge for incomparable Flow. Only one, an Iranian cartoon, "In the Shadow of the Cypress" (cypress is nowhere to be found) has some semblance of meaning. Two Dutch cartoons are in the running. The only distinction in both is p. joke.
Physics Nobelist Hans Bethe once noticed that what is left of the development of human culture is science only. He observed that most what literature could say about human condition was already said between the Bible, Homer and Shakespeare. And philosophy -- beginning with the Greeks and ending with Kant, with only science, which is currently unfinished.
Truly, all the human stories are so well treaded that Hollywood resuscitated Cinderella story in 1990 with only hint of sex and in 2024 with a full blown intercourse. Parts and parcels of the Odyssey were filmed by Coen brothers and, this year, by some unknown Latvian as the "Flow". Does it portend the end?
