Get A Grip

The scouts

A puffin who can't fly learning to embrace his difference—sounds like a Hallmark card, but the fisherman's bucket twist is weirdly specific enough to almost work, and I'm curious what Collings actually does with the 'strength through failure' inevitability.

Collings works within the established stop-motion fable tradition with evident care for tactile form and the pacing of emotional revelation; the tonal balance between whimsy and contemplation suggests a filmmaker fluent in the language of animated coming-of-age.

One minute to land a character arc on a flightless bird—the real craft move here is how Collings uses the bucket moment as inversion rather than punishment, and whatever choice she made in the animation of that first failed flight (timing, weight, the feathers) is probably what makes the whole thing resonate instead of collapse.