Take Flight

The scouts

A baby bird learns to fly—genuinely, that's the whole premise, and it lands with the subtlety of a greeting card. I'd need to see something genuinely perverse in the execution to care; right now it feels like animation doing exactly what animation is supposed to do.

Addington works within a lineage of hand-drawn metamorphosis narratives, and the formal restraint here—tender rather than saccharine—suggests a filmmaker aware of how crowded this territory is. The question is whether two minutes of contemplative animation justifies its own existence in that tradition.

There's a single moment where the bird's perspective shifts and the camera follows not the flight itself but the ground falling away—a choice that reframes the whole thing from achievement to vertigo, and it's what makes a familiar coming-of-age beat feel genuinely earned.