Once Upon a Line

A man sees a woman and falls in love—it's basically a Hallmark premise, and the whimsy barely masks how little is actually happening narratively, which means the film is betting everything on style, and style alone almost never carries Felix.

The line-based animation situates itself squarely in the lineage of contemporary minimalist animation, and the formal restraint in rendering emotion through pure geometry feels like a considered argument about what animation can express without mimesis.

The decision to tell a romance through negative space—what *isn't* drawn, the gaps where the eye completes the figure—is the hinge on which the entire emotional register turns, and it's the kind of constraint that forces a student filmmaker into real invention.

Winner of a Student Academy Award in 2016, Alicja Jasina's Once Upon a Line is a sweet seven-minute animation looking at love at first sight and the aftermath of such an experience. Following a man, stuck in his dreary daily routine, this University of Southern California production uses a fun line-based aesthetic to breathe some fresh air into a well-explored storyline.

Narratively, Once Upon a Line follows a pretty conventional romantic path. It's a short that wears its story arc on its sleeve, with its rises and falls clearly signposted and perfectly-placed, but although the plot is fun and engaging it was the aesthetic here that truly won us over.

With the titular line in Jasina's short not only serving as the basis for a clever fairytale pun in its name, but as metaphor for life and the path we take through it, it's visually that the line feels most important as it drives the film forward, injecting it with energy and direction.