Him

The scouts

A minute of charcoal and refugee trauma feels like the festival circuit's idea of 'brave,' which is exactly the kind of well-meaning restraint that puts me to sleep — unless Kirk's doing something formally perverse with that medium I'm not seeing yet.

The charcoal technique isn't decoration; it's a deliberate formal choice that situates the work in a lineage of expressionist animation while refusing the polish of the form, making material itself a statement about fragmentation and displacement.

That decision to work in charcoal — loose, smudged, impermanent — is the whole film; it's the one constraint that makes a minute about a child's fear feel urgent rather than sentimental, and Kirk knows exactly how much to let the medium speak for itself.