Fetch
2021 · 18m · New Zealand
Directed by Sam Gill
Genres: animation, drama, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
On a deteriorating, isolated space station, a man has lost the will to live; it falls to his anxious, big-hearted dog to overcome his own fears and use wits, will, and a waggily tail to save them both.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The elevator pitch sounds like grief therapy wrapped in a dog-saves-man rescue plot—aggressively earnest—but Gill weaponizes the anxious dog POV to completely invert the rescue narrative, making vulnerability the actual plot engine instead of sentiment. It's sentimental without being sentimental, which is the kind of contradiction that usually fails and occasionally breaks your brain.
The formal restraint here is remarkable: a chamber piece shot entirely through an animal's perceptual uncertainty, indebted to both the intimacy of Miyazaki's character work and the austere sci-fi mise-en-scène of early Tarkovsky sequences, yet wholly its own tonal register. Gill's compositional choices—the negative space, the non-anthropomorphic camera placement—reveal a director thinking seriously about what animation can do that live-action cannot.
The decision to sustain the entire narrative through the dog's anxious sensory logic—never cutting away to objective shots of the station, never letting us see what the man sees—transforms a $0 premise into something that only works because of that single formal constraint. That choice does all the heavy lifting, and it's enough.
Reviews
An ode to and love letter to faithful hounds everywhere, born from the director's own experiences with mental health.
A compassionate dog overcomes his own anxieties to save a man who has lost the will to live aboard a deteriorating space station.
Festivals
- Show Me Shorts 2021, Final Draft Best Screenplay Award
- Oakville Festivals of Film and Art 2021, Best International Short Film
- LA Shorts Fest 2021
- Uppsala International Short Film Festival 2021
- Tirana International Film Festival 2021
- Chicago International Children's Film Festival 2021
- Austin Film Festival 2021
- /slash Film Festival 2022