Gull's Landing
2023 · 4m
Directed by Kyousuke Shimazaki
Genres: animation, fantasy, mystery
Tones: contemplative, surreal, whimsical
A boy and his talking seagull pass through a deserted seaside town. There, they meet a mysterious old woman who isn’t what she seems.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A talking seagull and a mysterious old woman in a ghost town should be delightful nonsense, but Shimazaki plays it so straight and contemplative that it almost disappears into itself—which is either gutsy refusal of whimsy or a miscalculation I'm genuinely unsure about.
The film's restraint and formal composition recall a lineage of Japanese poetic animation—Takahata's influence hovers—though the narrative irresolution leaves it hovering between fable and sketch rather than achieving the weight of either.
That seagull's voice acting—the specific grain and timing of it—does something remarkable in four minutes: it makes the boy's isolation both comic and quietly devastating, turning what could've been whimsy into something that actually lands.