So long, Caz!
2023 · 7m
Directed by Jingqi Zhang
Genres: animation, comedy, coming-of-age
Caz refuses to graduate from The Clock Academy -- she wants to bring back the good times with her friends.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A coming-of-age about refusing to graduate sounds like the most well-trodden premise imaginable, but Zhang's commitment to the Clock Academy's absurdist logic—where time itself is the institution—does something genuinely weird with the nostalgia trap that most films play it safe with.
The animation carries clear lineage to whimsical indie traditions (Cartoon Saloon's emotional restraint, maybe early Studio Ghibli's attention to ritual), and Zhang's formal choice to make the academy itself a character through its architecture and clocks shows a curator's understanding of how setting becomes metaphor.
What makes this work is the decision to animate friendship not through dialogue or plot beats but through the specific rhythm of shared time—Zhang's sound design of the clocks and the pacing of how characters move through spaces together does more storytelling in seven minutes than most features manage with montages and voiceover.