Maple and Mae's Guide to the Universe
2022 · 6m
Directed by Palison Hsu
Genres: adventure, animation, coming-of-age
Maple and Mae — a bee and a moth — set out on a road trip to pen an expedition guide to the huge world beyond their small town.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's exactly the whimsical coming-of-age animation everyone expects — a bee and a moth go on a journey, learn about friendship, the end. There's nothing here that pushes back against the form; it's competent but thoroughly consensus.
Hsu situates this firmly in the lineage of character-driven animation that traces back through Studio Ghibli's sensibility — the deliberate pacing, the respect for small emotional beats between adventure beats, the formal restraint that lets the watercolor world breathe.
The real move is how Hsu uses negative space and silence between dialogue exchanges to let the two characters' different rhythms — the bee's urgency, the moth's hesitation — create all the tension without ever making it explicit; that compositional restraint on a short budget is what makes the relationship feel lived-in.