Sucks To Be The Moon
2024 · 11m
Directed by Eric Paperth, Tyler March
Genres: animation, comedy, fantasy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, whimsical
Jealous of the Sun’s stardom, the Moon bails into space in search of a planet that actually cares about him. Will he find his place in the universe, or is he destined to be a lonely loser forever?
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A celestial body having an existential crisis and literally ghosting the solar system is exactly the kind of absurdist premise that makes everyone else nervous — which means it's probably doing something right. The Moon-as-rejected-ego-on-a-space-odyssey thing shouldn't work, but contrarian energy this pure is hard to fake.
The anthropomorphic conceit risks collapsing into greeting-card sentimentality, though the directors seem aware enough of the tradition they're playing in — cosmic fables, space-bound character studies — to suggest they know where the line is. It hinges on whether the formal execution (pacing, visual language, tonal consistency) actually earns the whimsy.
What matters here is the single decision to make the Moon's abandonment genuinely funny rather than melancholic — that tonal choice ripples through everything, and if the performances and editing land the joke precisely, an 11-minute short about planetary jealousy becomes something that stays with you instead of feeling like a concept looking for a story.
Reviews
Eric Paperth und Tyler March haben für das Kurzfilmprogramm Adult Swim SMALLS den wundervollen Kurzfilm „Sucks To Be The Moon“ geschaffen, der von geringer Wertschätzung, Neid und Mißgunst erzählt – alles aus der Sicht des guten alten Mondes. Ohne den wäre das Leben auf der Erde nämlich nur halb so