My Butterfly
2026 · 2m
Directed by Kayden Park
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A soldier's journey to meet his dearest comrade after the war.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a war film that isn't interested in war—just two people and a butterfly, which is either profound or a Hallmark card, and I genuinely can't decide which one Felix I am right now.
The animation situates itself in a careful lineage of intimate, hand-drawn intimacy (thinking Loving Vincent territory), and the restraint in not showing the war itself is a formal choice that speaks to something classical about elegiac cinema.
Two minutes on a soldier's pilgrimage could be maudlin, but Park's decision to anchor the entire emotional weight in a single insect—tracking it across frames, letting it become the only constant—transforms a familiar sentiment into something tactile and genuinely earned.