Mind Me Good Now!
2005 · 8m · Canada
Directed by Chris Cormier, Derek Cummings
Genres: animation, family, fantasy
Children Tina and Dalby stray from home and encounter a cocoya, a wicked spirit that eats little boys, until Tina's resourcefulness defeats it and they return to their mother.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a well-made folktale adaptation, sure, but it plays the premise straight—a girl outwits a spirit-monster, everyone goes home. Where's the formal risk? Where's the thing that makes you question what animation can *do*?
A cleanly executed entry in the animator-as-folklorist tradition, with the kind of visual restraint and narrative pacing you see in the best NFB pedagogical work; Cormier and Cummings understand how to lodge myth in the frame without overstatement.
The real lift here is how they use negative space and silence to make the cocoya feel *present* without showing it constantly—that discipline of withholding in an 8-minute kids' film is the kind of choice that tells you someone knows exactly what they're doing.