Lucky Penny
2025 · 2m
Directed by Jaimi Qiu
Genres: animation, family, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
A lost penny explores the streets of San Francisco in order to find its owner.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A lost penny as protagonist sounds like twee indie pablum, but Qiu's actually doing something weirder here—treating inanimate object agency with the same deadpan commitment most films reserve for tortured humans. The move refuses to apologize for its own absurdity, which is refreshing.
This sits comfortably in the lineage of object-focused animation (think Pixar's formalist cousins), though Qiu's restraint with the 2-minute runtime suggests familiarity with the festival short tradition where economy is a formal virtue, not a constraint.
In two minutes, Qiu makes you care about a penny's journey through San Francisco by anchoring the whimsy to tactile, observational detail—the specific way light catches asphalt, the precise sound of rolling metal—those micro-choices that transform a high-concept gimmick into genuine tenderness.