El pez feliz
2006 · 2m · Taiwán
Directed by Alan I. Tuan, C. Jay Shih, Poliang Lin
Genres: animation, drama, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A lonely man finds company and comfort in his pet fish, and through a dream understands the value of freedom, in this moving story based on Jimmy Liao's 'A Fish that Smiled at Me'.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A man learns freedom through his fish—sure, it's sweet, but it's also the exact emotional throughline every greeting card and children's book has already mined to death. I respect the dream logic, but this feels like consensus sentiment dressed up in watercolor.
This adaptation of Liao's beloved source material demonstrates elegant formal restraint: the dream sequence operates as a classical reversal device, and the animation's translucent quality recalls a lineage of contemplative East Asian shorts that treat melancholy as its own aesthetic principle. It's precisely calibrated.
The decision to render the fish's perspective through subtle shifts in focus and color temperature—rather than anthropomorphizing it outright—is what makes the emotional transaction land; it's a small technical choice that transforms a potentially saccharine premise into something genuinely moving.