Lily & the Snowman (Lily y el muñeco de nieve)
2015 · 2m · Canadá
Directed by Dan Abdo
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, fantasy
Tones: melancholic, tender, whimsical
Every summer, a magical snowman puts on a show for a young girl, but the passage of time drives girl and snowman apart. As an adult, the woman must decide whether to make time again for a beloved childhood friend.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A magical snowman who only appears in summer is a genuinely strange premise, but the film plays it completely straight—it's got whimsy without subversion, melancholy without bite, and by the end you're just watching a greeting-card version of growing up that a dozen other shorts have already made.
Abdo works within a clear lineage of nostalgic fantasy shorts, and the formal restraint is admirable—the editing lets silences breathe, the magical realism sits comfortably alongside genuine emotional stakes—but it doesn't quite transcend its own tradition; it's a well-mannered entry in a familiar form.
The decision to keep the snowman entirely silent while the girl ages through voiceover creates an asymmetry that does the heavy lifting here—her words drift away from him while he remains frozen in wonder, and in that single formal choice, two minutes becomes a complete meditation on what we outgrow and what refuses to change.