RUSH HOUR 繁忙時間
2023 · 2m
Directed by Veda Lee
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tender
During rush hour after another long day of work, a man accidentally falls into the platform gap -- only to realise that there is another world out there.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A man tumbles into the subway gap and discovers a parallel world—sure, it's a fairy-tale premise, but Lee's doing something genuinely strange with the surrealism, refusing to punch it up or make it neat, and that refusal is exactly why it works.
The film situates itself thoughtfully within animated tradition—there's a lineage here from Miyazaki's sense of liminal space and transformation—but what distinguishes it is Lee's formal restraint, the way the animation breathes rather than overwhelms.
The choice to hold on silence and negative space in those first moments after the fall—to let the animation simply *exist* without rushing to explain—is what transforms a high-concept premise into something that actually lands emotionally.