Above the Clouds
2022 · 12m · Hungary
Directed by Vivien Harshegyi
Genres: animation, comedy, romance
Tones: humorous, tender, whimsical
A young woman begins falling for someone new but is paralyzed by memories of her first love. When she recognizes the familiar signs of infatuation, she bolts into an imaginative vortex of past memories, forcing her to untangle her confused mind and heart.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Anxious girl runs through her own brain in a Mind Game comp — sure, fine, the animation probably rips. Romantic dread as slapstick is a genre that mostly produces 'cute' shorts that disappear from memory in 48 hours.
Hungarian animation continues its quiet renaissance through MOME, and Harshegyi's pitch sits comfortably in the Yuasa-adjacent register of subjective emotional turbulence. Pleasant rather than essential.
14:05 of Hungarian rom-com animation with 58.7K Vimeo views and a robust 593 likes — that ratio reads as audience love, and the credits show a real composer/sound designer team (Hegyi, Kalotás) doing the heavy lifting on translating panic into rhythm. Slapstick about romantic dread is hard to land.
Reviews
A hilarious film, but beneath the humour, you can feel the truth and pain.
Absolutely wonderful and so visually captivating.
Festivals
- Annecy International Animation Film Festival 2022
- Ottawa International Animation Festival 2022
- Friss Hús Budapest International Short Film Festival 2022, Best Hungarian Animation
- Animafest Zagreb 2023
- Filmschoolfest Munich