A Cloud's Dream
2011 · 1m · Canada
Directed by Andrew Hicks
Genres: animation, experimental, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, surreal, whimsical
A single cloud drifts from dusk to dawn, its imagination carrying it through changing formations and unfamiliar skies.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A cloud having an interior life is genuinely funny in its refusal to pick a side—too sincere for comedy, too whimsical for gravitas—and that tonal stubbornness is exactly what makes it work when nobody else would greenlight it.
Hicks situates this squarely in the lineage of poetic animation that treats metamorphosis as philosophical inquiry; the restraint of a one-minute runtime and the precision of each formation shift reveals a curator's hand aware of every frame's weight.
The decision to let the cloud's transformations happen in pure negative space—no anthropomorphic eyes, no cute gestures—forces the animation itself to carry consciousness, and that single formal choice transforms sentiment into something austere and genuinely moving.