My Moon

A celestial romance that could've been treacly mythology-by-numbers, but Lee leans hard into the weirdness of bodies that only speak in stolen human fragments—it's genuinely unsettling in ways the premise doesn't advertise, and I'm annoyed I kind of love it.

The film positions itself in a lineage of poetic animation that treats celestial mechanics as metaphor (Méliès onward), but what elevates it is the formal restraint: how Lee lets negative space and the careful editing of found-media dialogue do the emotional work that sentimentality would ruin.

The decision to strip dialogue down to fragmented media scraps instead of composing original voice work forces every frame to carry emotional weight through animation alone—it's a constraint that transforms what could be a simple love triangle into something genuinely aching and strange.

Lee's style discovers this pleasing point between abstract minimalism and mograph maximalism, and the result is intoxicating. Lee's defining skill throughout his young career has been to marry nostalgic melancholy to his pristine art and My Moon delivers on this front as well.

It's a fascinating concept, and works thematically with the film—there is something heart-wrenching to the disembodied dialogue, and the multitudinous voices featured, that amplifies this feel of disconnection that both illustrates Moon's despair. Moon is not the self-righteous hero of the film, and it is only when he is able to put aside his jealousy and accept the authenticity of Earth's feelings and the unique joy of their relationship that crisis is averted.

Funded in part via a successful Kickstarter campaign, and co-produced by Sarah Kambara and the boutique LA animation studio Chromosphere, Lee has fully established himself as a rising star with upcoming work including a shorts series at Shadow Machine and a show-runner role lined-up for a new Netflix series.